We shouldn’t complain, but winter’s wickedness is getting old

A Prairie Notebook

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Winter just can’t give up, it seems.
It has stacked snow as high as cars in the area, has whipped up winds that cut visibility causing poor driving conditions and has delivered more than a week of snow days to area school children. That’s just in the last six weeks.
Before that, winter was mild mannered. Lately it has quite an attitude, as if it’s out to win an “I told you so” argument.
It’s safe to say that most people are tired of the scooping, the slipping and a dress code of parkas, hats, gloves, scarves and boots that comes with the coldest months.
But other folks point out that we have become soft. Wimps even. Weak. And dare I say, pansies?
It’s true, and I’ve decided there is nothing wrong with that.
Thinking back to the winters of my youth, which sounds a little Shakespearian, I don’t remember many, if any, snow days. It’s possible there were a few in the late 1960s and 1970s in northeastern South Dakota. There was one storm where we lost electricity for at least three days and lived in our basement, cooking and warming up by a small stove. But if we could make it to town to school, we stayed there, sometimes for days.

When we registered for school in the fall, country kids like me had to put down a family’s name who we would stay with in bad weather.
I had cousins in town and my best friend so those families were my “town homes.” If the bus couldn’t take me home, that’s where I went.
I remember my cousins’ dad tucking us in at night and giving our pillows the biggest fluffing I had ever seen, turning them into clouds for our sleepy heads. It made me feel safe and content when I was in the early grades.
When I got older, I got to stay with a friend. It was better than any snow day.
My friend’s family owned a restaurant so we got to “eat out” every meal. We also got to play in the gigantic pantry area and help clean up at closing time.
There were other times as a child that I remember my dad making Herculean efforts to get me to the bus. We lived nearly two miles off of a highway, and at least once when our road was blocked, he took me by snowmobile to meet the bus. One other time, he blasted his four-wheel-drive pickup through a drift of snow blocking our road to do the same.
One winter we rented a house in town for a few months just so we wouldn’t have to fight the snow-packed rural roads.
Maybe each generation gets wimpier in dealing with winter. My mom remembers getting a horse and buggy ride with heavy quilts wrapped around her to keep warm on the trip to a one-room school in first grade.
I have, however, had to find my way between home and Flandreau on a couple of days of nasty weather. I’m the first to admit how anxious it makes me when visibility is poor, Interstate 29 is icy and Highway 32 is snow-packed, making it fairly difficult to see where the road ends and the ditch begins. I’ve jokingly said that I29 south of Trent is like the Summit of Moody County. It seems like that’s where the worst weather will congregate.
There’s been long stretches – too long – when I’ve just worked from home rather than make the commute to town. It’s a nice option.
Over the years, I’ve lost the child-like love of snow days or winter weather in general. Winter, as a child, was an adventure. Hopefully, that’s how children still see it today, too.
I don’t want to taint the fun with complaints about more snow and bad roads. I want to sail the speed limit down our roads without worrying about ice accumulating on bridges. I want the courage to know I can make it to and from a night meeting without the anxiety and fear of what the weather will do.
I’m trying to be brave and say that I’ll not complain anymore about this winter of my adulthood. I know spring will come. But given the circumstances, it’s hard to stop being a wimp, weak and even a pansy. Trust me, I’m all of that.