I Heart Frozen Mix

In months without foliage the bedroom window shows me the T-intersection below the cliff and about 200 yards away--dangerous during the best of times because from both ways the county highway curves and comes sharply downhill. On snowy/icy/sleety nights when hearing the snowplow thundering my way to shear snow from the road, I get up to see its lashing yellow lights briefly pass then disappear, thinking: Someone's taking care of us. And someone is hoping he comes home safely and soon.

No one else here voluntarily drives in this weather, so during snows a vast silence is broken only by the plow, usually. Tonight's big wet flakes the TV weatherman called "hamster-sized" (welcome to Missouri), ticked the roof like cornflakes. I went out to take photos with my newish phone, not realizing its camera had automatic flash until back indoors when I saw how the camera flash captured the trails of falling snowflakes, a phenomenon otherwise invisible.

This is the first real winter in several years, with snow days (four or five now) and frozen mix -- my favorite. It really is like driving in that frozen mix of peas, cubed carrots and green beans you buy in the freezer section -- my worst nightmare. So I appreciate the plow and like watching it come up one side of the road and down the other. Beats seeing ambulances and cops converge at our crossroads as happens about once every season. I am told that when I was a kid I did not want to play with dolls but with trucks.

Winter Comes to Missouri

"Merry Christmas," I said to the custodian while tracking icy, dirty snow water onto his clean floor in the middle of March, the first snowy day after a string of 60- to 75-degree February days that had us all smug and out on the porch wearing tees and shorts. I was so happy I'd taken advantage of a clear dry Saturday, the previous week, to visit a distant university library during its spring break where its librarians, otherwise idle, waited on me, patiently answering low-hanging questions about the technology and returning over and over to my computer terminal to teach me things about stuff when of course they would rather be sunning.

Luckily I'd chosen that over planting vegetable seeds. Never be fooled by Missouri weather. During the warm days the bluebirds arrived and I raked up leaves into long landing strips of wet earth and sparse grass because they eat by pinning live prey to the earth. They do that more easily if the ground is free of fallen leaves and I was promptly at their service because bluebirds are among the top 100 things about life. I am their custodian. May I be always strong enough to do the job.

While looking for beauty I found a nest I'd never seen before although it had to have been there all winter.

The Ice Storm

Yes, there's an ice storm, but it has sights to offer we can't get any other way. The map, from 11 a.m. Saturday, says "Lake Adelle" which is some miles away near Cedar Hill, because that is the closest transmission tower working. I got lots of emails from outta state relatives and friends whose TVs told them this was a disaster. Felt like a celebrity.

Friday I woke very late because there was so little daylight. Snowfall had turned to ice. I crunched over the frozen grass, fed the birds, and later when they called for seconds even the grass was too slippery to walk on to refill their feeders. I listened to the road all day. For hours and hours there was no traffic, none, a great silence, except the tick-tick of frozen rain on the roof and maybe every three hours the throaty roar of a truck spreading gravel and salt at the intersection and over the LaBarque's little bridge. I was in the kitchen cooking nearly all day. This morning I picked broken branches out of the lane; there weren't many, and broke the coat of ice that had sealed our mailboxes. Roads were clear at 33 degrees (because, they explain, and it's as good an explanation as any, because four days ago it was 71 degrees, and two days later it was 0 degrees, and now you have to drink a shot). There's more precip at the moment, but my neighbor and I are fine.

That Strange Phenomenon

It happens all the time in Missouri, not in very many other places, as if Missouri were the land of paradox and the fantastical. From 100 degrees Fahrenheit at 100 percent humidity to crippling far-below-zero Polar Vortex, even our seasons aren't predictable: they could be long, short, too early, too late to start, too cold, too wet; and the seasons have harbingers that are sometimes false (such as this year's cool August leading into hot days in early September) and sometimes true, such as hot weather beginning in early March for the record-setting sizzling summer of 2012.

Behold, then, the maker of rainbows: the sun shower. Many other nations call this phenomenon "The Wolf's Wedding" or some variation on that, such as "a witch is getting married," or "monkeys are getting married." That's according to Wikipedia. U.S. old-timers, reflecting the hard times they had to live in, are likely to say when it sun-showers, "The devil is beating his wife" -- and the rain equals her tears. Last evening we got a great sun-shower example (21 seconds) and no one was harmed.

That Sound of an Oncoming Train. . .

The weather man said afterward that the storm had 100-mph winds. When that horrible onrushing-train sound that means a tornado arrived and persisted about 7:45 p.m. last night, I took cover in my 5 x 4.5-foot bathroom, with my laptop and phone. That's probably how the Apocalypse will find me: Huddled in the can, not with family photos or a bankbook, but with the tools of my trade.

Tornadoes touched down east and north of here, wrecking 100 houses, but no one died. The storm came in darkness and left in darkness, so dawn was everyone's first chance to see the damage. The roaring winds tore off the top of the tallest and oldest cedar on the cliff edge behind my house. This exposed the tree's rosy  heartwood, both sad and very beautiful. The brave tree, to its last moment, kept the house safe. Now we must face future storms without it.

Water from the Sky

The storm introduced itself with a gust of wind of the kind that snaps trees and sends logs flying through the air. Earth-quaking thunder passed over. The electrical power shorted out at 11 p.m. Soon the violent part of the storm was over. My device's battery ran down and, with nothing else to do in the pitch darkness, I went to to bed wondering what I'd see outside in the morning.

The pump is electric, so the only water was in the pipes and there wasn't much. I had filled pans with water as the storm approached, and had also put in a few gallons' supply, but these bottles past their expiration date tasted chemical, so I used it only for washing. Made a cup of tea. All things, including my life, felt like luxuries. Going outside I saw downed branches but nothing serious; my fragile tomato plants were undamaged. In fact all plants sang with happiness because they'd been rained on. With great curiosity I approached the rain gauge and was amazed and grateful to see a full two and a half inches. So ended the hottest and most dreadful stretch of drought here since the Dust Bowl days.

For a while I tried recharging my device through my car battery to check the electric company's outage map, but soon ran low on gasoline. I couldn't work on the computer so I took a walk and saw a swollen, muddy LaBarque where there had been only a thin nagging trickle. I then swept leaves from my porch, broke down boxes for recycling in the garage, and had my first full day outdoors for many weeks; the storm cooled the air from the 100s to the 90s. As it got too warm I went into town to an air-conditioned hair salon to get a haircut I'd been putting off.

Just as the day was beginning to be not so wonderful, when after 16 hours without electricity I started to think about the spoiling food and useless toilet, the electric power resumed and everything indoors sang too.

Cloud-of-the-Month Club

People talk about storing their music and photos in "the cloud," about sharing their files in "the cloud" and getting "cloud certification" in"cloud architecture." They explain that "the cloud is software as a service." And today, in the city, I saw the mighty cloud that they must be referencing. It was 102 degrees Fahrenheit in the parking lot where I stood, and within an hour the sky was raining and booming and steam rose from the sidewalks. July in Missouri? You betcha!