Winter in the mountains hangs on like a canker sore. I have no problem in the dead of winter, when
it is cold everywhere and we just have it a little worse than my people back
home. But this in-between time as I wait
for spring to rise to our elevation makes me crazy. I see my girlfriends’ pictures
on Facebook of sunny patios and shirtless children. Our friends in Mississippi have reported that
the hummingbirds have returned.
Meanwhile, our feeders sit filled with sugar water hanging in silence
like they’ve been stood up for the prom.
I have a friend in Alabama who once interviewed for a job at Virginia
Tech. One of the interview questions was
“what will you do when you wake up one morning and there’s 36 inches of snow on
the ground?” My friend’s reply “I’ll
turn around, go back in the house and go back to bed.” He did not get the job. This sentiment towards cold weather rings
pretty consistent throughout the Deep South and I am not exempt. However, we are mountain people now and that
requires that we toughen up.
One winter Sunday a few months ago my husband and I were readying
for the day. I had to go do some work at
our local community center and he was tasked with bundling up each kid, putting
them in the stroller and walking them to a late afternoon birthday party just
up the road. I could see the reluctance on his face, the sky outside was
overcast and the grey on the mountains indicated there would be no sunbeams at the
party. Half way through my afternoon I
looked out the window to see large clumps of snow falling. I jumped in the car to drive to meet my
family; convinced they would be stuck at home in this weather. Instead, I found
them at the party. Oliver’s bright red coat
darting through a pack of bundled kids in the yard. Isabel was on the porch in her daddy’s arms
dressed in her baby snowsuit. The stroller
was parked under the awning covered with piles of blankets. He had strolled the kids through the snow; we
were in fact mountain people. I watched the
swarm of children screaming, “Snow! Snow!”
only to hear my son chanting, “Cotton! Cotton!”
We are mountain people but there’s more to the story. My son jumped in a hopper full of cotton with
his cousins long before he ran through his first snow. My story is not his story,
but he has enough of me to recognize cotton before snow and I have enough of
home to feel no shame in griping about the weather.
