Buffalo Gal

The past week has featured colder days than we have had in quite some time,including last winter which was pleasantly mild. I am recalling things my Mom told me about the winter of 1936….it was the most beastly winter in a long time with heavy snow and bitter cold then came the summer of 1936 when it was as hot as a blast furnace and so dry that domestic livestock had nothing to eat in their pastures. Could we be repeating a weather pattern from the Dirty Thirties?
I have read a forecast from a farm news magazine that predicts a bad drought for summer of 2013..it is not the Farmer’s Almanac type of prediction –it is from a national meterologist. Long term weather prediction is dicey at best but with current highly scienfific methods, Meteorologists can see patterns that show certain weather conditions coming up months later.
I have to go out in this blasted cold wind and take a couple of pictures for a feature article I have written. It is to be taken on the site of an old skating rink I once skated on. Now the huge vacant lot of the past is filled with new houses where our skating rink used to be— plus our football field and our baseball diamond. Times change and one whole block that used to be vacant (circuses and carnivals set up there too in the days long gone) is now filled with homes and lawns.
I wanted to have my old skates on the picture but they have been long- gone also. The old white leather of my beautiful figure skates kind of dried up and crumbled away. It is an allegory of getting older as humans—we begin to crumble and dry up also.
It is going to be mighty cold standing on that old corner where the rink used to be.
I read OH LOOK A SHINY THING’s blog today and she has a great link to a site to read about the SCHOOLHOUSE BLIZZARD or the CHILDRENS’ BLIZZARD of winter, 1888.
I am sure that is the year that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about in one of her novels, THE LONG WINTER. It was one of the worst on record. Many children died in that blizzard in 1888..on their way home from many country schoolhouses,they were caught in fierce blinding snow and terrible freezing winds— and simply lay down and died of exposure.
I thought about that book THE LONG WINTER. I read it when the winters get so cold and stormy and it satisfies something deep within my psyche. I am going to find it and read it again probably for the 15th time in my life. I am drawn to that book like a moth to a flame. I could read GIANTS IN THE EARTH instead but it is ponderous, heavy and so sad I do not think I can do it this winter.
I cannot think of any comparisons for
IT IS SO COLD THAT……………..
I wish a few commenters would fill in that blank phrase for me.