Winter

It was a quarter to ten in the morning as I begin this yesterday. The temperature outside had risen…yes, risen…to 5 degrees. The wind chill was twelve below zero. The sun was out and everything was bright, because everything was covered with nine inches of white. Where my son lives, an hour away on a clear day, there was eleven inches of snow.

Kids were sent home early from school early the day before and kept home by something or other yesterday. It couldn’t be there was any snow, of course, because the Al Gore Church of Global Warming preachers told us 13 years ago that our children wouldn’t know what snow is.

Mr. I-invented-the-Internet himself told us in December 2007 that the entire north polar cap would be gone in five years. He based that on a climate scientist’s claim that the Arctic ice could totally be gone by 2013. Oops! Tell that to those 52 Russian Scientists and tourists who sailed an icebreaker to the pole over New Years and got trapped in the ice for over a week. They went to see the melting and saw the freezing, until helicopters managed to rescue them. But then, that was the South Pole.

We could use a bit of that warming around here, because it is just going to get colder and that snow out there isn’t going anywhere for a few days, apparently meaning not before near mid-February. I have taken precautions to prevent my water pipes from freezing this time. I can’t do anything about the TV channels taking everything off to have team coverage of every wind gust and degree dip. Hey, people, it is called winter!

We had half of our ten biggest snowfalls in the last five years. I heard last week the Global Warming clingers were despairing because they couldn’t convince most people to believe them. Their biggest problem is the weather doesn’t cooperate. The person yelled that “97% of scientists agreed”, a figure I sincerely doubt, but even if true science isn’t consensus, it’s what is. We must remember scientists once concurred that the world was flat and Flat-earth Deniers like Columbus would sail off the edge. They concurred that the best way to treat illness was to bleed out the bad blood, either with some knife slices or better yet, leeches. Scientists once concurred surgeons to wash their hands before operating was a silly waste of time.

When I was in grade school the scientists told me I would never see a man on the moon in my lifetime.

This winter takes me back to my boyhood when our winters were just like this in the ‘fifties and early ‘sixties. I wrote a story in 1961 called, “Last Cold Spring” because we were still wearing winter jackets in June. It 1958 the country got hit by a blizzard, the one that killed Elizabeth Taylor’s then husband, Mike Todd, in a plane crash. That storm closed down southern Pennsylvania, knocked out the electric for a week. We lived more country then, so we had no heat, no lights, no TV, no water and no working toilet for that time.  Hey, people, it is called winter! It isn’t new.

Yeah, it’s cold, so layer up and enjoy the briskness of the air.

Oh, this just in, there is a chance that summer may be hot.