Interesting Spring

My friend Deanna keeps track of the truth of the old axiom “If it thunders in February, It will frost in April”. We were discussing it not long ago. She marked it down on the calendar when it did thunder in February. I called her day before yesterday to find out if there was a correlation sine the weatherman gave the forecast for frost this week. She had it documented. The frost was not forecasted for the exact same day, but was within a couple of days. Maybe our ancestors didn’t have the Weather Channel, but it seems that some of their superstitions were more that just folklore.

I am a person who loves the “what ifs?” of life. I still say that the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy and that Elvis is alive and well, living in Minnesota and shopping at Wal-Mart. He is just so fat and homely now that he looks like a bad imitation of one of his impersonators. Where better to hide out from the press hounds than in plain sight?

From now on I will pay more attention when it thunders in February. I was lulled into thinking that spring has come. I had begun, but luckily, not finished the process of swapping out winter and spring clothes. Most of the winter stuff I wear little enough anyway. I have to admit that all the wool and fur coats are not really for the climate of rural Southwest Alabama. We get chilly, but only occasionally does it get really bone chillingly cold for any length of time. We get a lot more wear out of shirtsleeves that coats.

I was caught napping as far as the cold was concerned. I still have space heaters in my old house. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that they do the job quite well. The other is that I love having a window unit air conditioner in my bedroom in the summer. I had turned off the pilot lights on the heaters. I hate to turn them on again just for a day or two. It has gotten down to freezing for the last two nights. My remedy has been to get up early in the morning and make a fire in the fireplace. I love to have my early morning coffee or tea by the fire. By midmorning the whole downstairs is warm. I close off the hall that leads to the upstairs where the heat will all rise. I don’t even have heaters upstairs because it always stays warm enough without them.

Old houses do have their quirks. One of them is that we build our houses in rural Southwest Alabama to accommodate the long hot summers. Winter is no more to us than a passing bother. Our tall ceilings are made to cause the summer heat to rise. We have heat in the winter, but it is not our houses reason for being. As I’ve told you before, we can use our front porches for about nine months of the year. It serves as an extended living room. I call myself the Front Porch Philosopher because I do most of my meditating there. I also do most of my entertaining there, too. I have friends who call to see if I’m porch sitting so they can come join me and others who just ride by and if I’m out there, stop to chat. Just last week I had two different overnight guests. We were able to sit on the porch until bedtime chatting. This week, we’d freeze out testers off if we tried.

The thing I hate most about the cold snap is that I have recently accumulated some very nice plants in my travels around the region. I am just itching to get them in the ground. I was counting on this week to begin my spring planting in earnest. As I sit here by the fire, I think I might as well enjoy this, probably the last fire of the season. I said that last month, too.
I visited with Joyce and Ed Burrage yesterday down at Chilton. Joyce has an antique flower garden she’s been cultivating since 1974. She has some nice early blooms that I took pictures of to share with you. There are some early clematis and some real English daisies from seed she got in England. I hope tonight’s cold snap doesn’t get them.

I guess I should just be glad I live in rural Southwest Alabama where this cold, too, shall pass.