snow

Okay, it snowed. Second foot-deep snow in three days up here in the hills.
I'm not going to complain about the snow or winter. Yeah, it's a pain in the butt, dangerous, inconvenient, costly (oil at 3.19 a gallon?!), but also beautiful, fun to play in, and a change from the other seasons. Those of us easily bored like the change.

I figure if it really bugs someone, that person should hightail it out for warmer climes. Places with high humidity in the summer, lots of bugs, nasty snakes, kudzu growing in your underwear and alligators who view humans as steak tartare on the hoof.

I went to visit a girlfriend while she was staying at her mother's place in Florida, near the Gulf coast. It was a retiree community. There was a pond and the pond, my g-f said, had an alligator in it. I myself saw it's evil eyes just above the waterline as it waited for some hapless bird or fish to come by. The g-f said that when they got too big, the state came and took them out. All I could think of was that this community had people going around on walkers, and alligators can reach speeds of thirty miles an hour on foot. Every morning when I went out I expected to find a crushed walker and maybe a slipper laying on the road near the pond.

Nice place to visit. Live there? Uh uh. Assuming I ever get out of debt enough to retire, I'm heading even further south, the Caribbean would be nice. Or maybe one of those Greek islands on the Mediterranean, one of the ones where there aren't any cars and I can sit at an outdoor cafe sipping wine and flirting with the local widows. Or any other woman who comes by. I'm not biased. Except to those whose husbands own automatic weapons.

Anyway, I was talking about snow. Remember? Snow and cold and high winds. New Englanders take a perverse pride in this stuff. They like to brag about how they survived every winter. I notice tho, that a lot of them, when they reach retirement age, light out for those kudzu states. it's not the cold, it's the shoveling.

Up here in the bucolic hills of Western Massachusetts, there are, or have recently been (pause for respectful silence) a remarkably large number of pretty darn old farmers and other residents. They promote their way of life as enabling longevity, but I think it's just the weak ones died or headed out for California. Or kudzu country. There's a reason why the hills are sparsely populated.

I'm not feeling so well myself lately.