RIVER CITY JOURNAL: HEY! ENOUGH ICE! TRY SOMETHING ELSE FOR A CHANGE!

Stop pussyfooting around in those prayers for seasonable weather. It's time for straight-shooting intercessions. Amen!

As far as I'm concerned, it's time for spring. Or two feet of snow. Right now I'd take either one.

The recent ice storms remind me how weather patterns change. When I was growing up on that Kelo Valley farm in the Ozarks west of here, we rarely had a real snowstorm. The worst winter weather I recall was sleet.

Try doing chores around the barn with sharp pieces of ice being whipped into your face by the wind.

OK. I'll admit smart folks don't stand outside in sleet storms. But a boy who hates to milk a cow will do almost anything to take his mind off the old Jersey who never took a hurried step in her life, winter storm or no winter storm.

I swear Lulu, the milk cow, would purposely take the longest path from field to barn during the worst weather. The more I'd try to speed her up, the slower she would go.

A psychoanalyst would probably figure out pretty fast that the old cow didn't like me or my cold hands any more than I liked having to milk her.

Don't tell me animals aren't devious. I've never met an animal that didn't know how to get even. Anyone who grew up on a farm knows that.

Some of you may be at a disadvantage in your understanding of the animal -- that is to say, the non-human -- psyche. Perhaps your total knowledge of animal behavior is based on your relationship with a fuzzy cat or a cold-nosed dog.

Pity.

You should have spent some time with hogs.

However, when it comes to really nasty winter weather, even farm animals want to be in the barn. A farm animal will give up its routine of eating and sleeping in order to have a little shelter and to share the warmth of other animal bodies.

Farm folks, who spend a lot of time with animals, pick up some of this native intelligence. Except for breaking through the ice on the pond so the animals can drink, farmers have good enough sense to abandon their routines during blizzards.

The rest of us, those of us whose farm ties have been severed far too long, have apparently developed soft spots in our brains. When an ice storm comes, what do we do?

We try to go to work.

We try to take our children to school.

We go looking for the newspaper on glassy driveways.

We go check for mail in mailboxes frozen shut.

Those of us who have forgotten all the common sense we took for granted on the farm wind up with expensive automobiles in ditches. We slip-slide hither and yon as if the world might stop spinning if we didn't risk every bone in our bodies to get somewhere -- anywhere -- when the rain is freezing.

And then, just to punctuate our addled thinking, we call and complain about the undelivered newspaper.

Or the mail that never got put in the iced-locked mailbox.

Or the street that didn't get sanded and salted immediately.

Or the electricity that went off because ice-heavy limbs have done what heavy things do: fall down.

Ah, the good old days.

You couldn't have had a daily newspaper delivered to Kelo Valley even if you wanted it. The Weekly Star Farmer from Kansas City told you all you needed to know as often as you needed to know it. There were no electric lines to be snapped by wind-crazed limbs. The commute to your job was as far as the barn or the pond or the fence in need of mending.

And transportation? Why, the trusty tractor, of course, which, like the tough-hided milk cow, never seemed to care much about weather forecasts. The old Ferguson was just as happy pulling cars up the hill over frozen gravel as a plow in spring.

Oh. There's something else we would do well to recall from the less-hectic days of farm life: simple words that ease any situation. Words like:

"Could be worse."

"You've got to take the bad with the good."

"You think this is bad? You should have been here in '36."

There.

Feel better?

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.