The winter of our discontent

For years now, Iowa might as well have been Tennessee in winter: A few bone-cold days, a snow storm or two, a little ice, but mostly moderate days, brown hills and clear roads --- easy trucking for those who truck.

So when the time came to tell our winter tales we fell back on the past, and I remembered …

… that winter in the late 1970s or early 1980s when the snow started in November and by March still was piled up in banks higher than cars along Iowa Highway 9 as it shot due west parallel to the Minnesota border. After lunch one sunny day, my next-door neighbors drove away, the wind came up, the road between the snow banks vanished , a fast-moving vehicle lost its way and slammed into theirs head-on and although he lived, she died.

Or the Halloween that dawned brown and mild enough for a long walk in a light jacket around town before we headed for work and the ice came, the Great North Iowa Ice Storm that flattened power poles like matchsticks and left thousands in the dark for days on end. Doug and I drove the 40 miles toward home in the calm after midnight through an eerie landscape --- the prairie flat and white and gleaming in starlight, familiar yard lights extinguished, only the faint gleam of lantern light sometimes in farmhouse windows. We didn’t see the ground until spring that year either.

And now winter’s back as surely we knew it would be --- The Great Southern Iowa Ice Storm of Dec. 11 that left thousand without power for days on end and shattered half or more or the trees in south central and southeast Iowa, the minus-20-degree-and-more mornings, the snow, a Monday blizzard that left me snow-stranded comfortably in Chariton this week while those on the road up here in the northland and elsewhere headed for shelter.

I’d forgotten how wearing winter can be, how much effort is required to deal with snow when it’s too cold for any sensible person to be outside, creeping cabin fever. How you just want to read, or take a nap or play with those computers not available 20-30 years ago --- taking imaginary trips to Australia or Bali, anywhere in the southern hemisphere where it’s summer --- and nothing seems to get done other than what has to be done to stay alive and make a living.

Christmas, I admit, was lovely in its whiteness and I’ve added a Christmas Eve drive from Chariton to Grace Episcopal Church in Albia through frosted hills with a full moon rising to my list of winter tales, along with the ice and the snow and the cold. But I’m ready for spring or virtual Tennessee again.

Shakespeare’s “winter of our discontent” ended with “this son of York (Richard III)” and ours will end I suppose with the sunshine of spring.

My dad fell back to the 1930s when the time came to tell winter tales; and I return the 1970s and 1980s. Now a new generation has its stories to tell, too.