LETTERS FROM HOME: GUNSLINGER SQUINTS, GOOD NEWS ABOUT DEAD BUGS

Feb. 8, 1996

Dear Pat,

Now I know what "the winter of our discontent" means. Too many polar days and nights without cease. The spirit shriveled. The sun on the trampled snow made you squint like Clint Eastwood. And that's just about how everybody feels.

There's grouchiness at work and at home and in the mirror. Got a problem? It's colder outside.

One bonus of this deep cold spell is that fewer insects and fleas will survive to eat our gardens and infest our dogs come summer. That's a bit hard to celebrate right now, but look at it from the bugs' point of view.

We look at long-range forecasts as if they were tea leaves to be divined. They are notoriously inaccurate, which just means that many fortunetellers come with a license. So we look at the current forecast of temperatures in the 60s with both hope and skepticism.

The river, you see, has been frozen into chunks of ice and looks like a scene from a science fiction movie. An alien terrain of jagged white edges. Boats have been stranded midstream. This happens very seldom now because the river flows stronger due to levees and the constant barge traffic keeps the ice from becoming a solid mass.

But historical accounts speak of a time when people could ice skate on the Mississippi up to the small community of Neely's Landing, and sometimes took sleds across the icy surface to Illinois to bring back coal.

DC and I recently drove with her mother and brother over the bridge that now connects our town with Illinois. We were looking for Indian pottery shards and geese. We found no shards, few geese.

There's a nice restored courthouse in the little town of Thebes, though. A plaque announces that Dred Scott was once imprisoned in the dungeon there. History honors our failures along with our accomplishments.

The land across the river has long hinted of sin and mild corruption for us saintly Missourians. The Chicago mob "protected" some of the nightclubs over there, people said, and an awful lot of them seemed to burn down mysteriously.

My grandparents owned a roadhouse there for awhile, and once a week a guy would come by to pick up the sack of money that allowed them to stay in business.

The drinking age used to be younger than Missouri's, so that's where a lot of teen-agers received their baptism into the rites of alcohol, for better or worse.

Now I see another Illinois, a land of soft hills that hide petroglyphs and ancient swamps and small communities of artists and craftsmen. Oh, and a good golf course at Rend Lake.

The temperature is warming now. The snow has melted and the ice on the Mississippi is beginning to move. In keeping with the flow, an 8:52 a.m. tee time has been made for the weekend.

Spring is still more than a month away, but all this motion gives hope that the beginning of the end of this Shakespearean winter's tale is nigh.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.