RIVER CITY JOURNAL: IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T NOTICED, IT'S GETTING KIND OF MUSHY

No, no. Not the candy-and-flowers kind of mushy. It's beginning to look a lot like gumbo time in River City.

I've heard that some New England states have five seasons: Spring, summer, fall, winter and mud.

The mud season comes as the ground starts to thaw after a customarily hard winter. I've never seen a New England mud season up close, but I understand it's a mess.

Missouri has its own kind of mud season. Make that seasons. We are in a temperate zone where it can turn muddy at the drop of a hat.

Last weekend I went to check on the food supply in the bird feeder outside our kitchen window. The feeder is on a pole not too far from a limestone fence post imported from central Kansas. The fence post weighs more than 200 pounds, and it holds its own in a windstorm.

I noticed the fence post had started to list toward the house a bit. When I checked it, I could see that the freezing-thawing cycles of recent days had made the ground mushy around the fence post.

I found out how mushy when I stepped into a bare area of the yard where lilies of the valley and other plants grow. I sank up to my ankles in ooze.

Not too many years ago, several trees were blown down in some of Cape Girardeau's parks. These were mature and otherwise healthy trees. Strong wind gusts arrived at a time when there had been so much rainfall that the ground was saturated. The roots of the trees simply couldn't hold on in the mire. As much as anything, the trees got off balance and toppled over.

I'm not sure I've ever seen real gumbo mud, but I've lived a lot of places where the mud was commonly called gumbo.

One of these places was Maryville, Mo., in the northwest corner of the state. That part of Missouri is famous for its rolling fields. There aren't a lot of trees in Northwest Missouri, and wind erosion is a big problem, particularly in the spring when the fields have been freshly plowed.

As far as I'm concerned, the mud around Maryville qualifies as gumbo. When it rains or when the frozen ground is thawing, walking across your yard can be a sticky adventure. Thick layers of mud stick to your shoes, growing bigger and heavier with every step.

When we first moved to Maryville in the late 1970s, our younger son was not quite 5 years old. We arrived in the dead of winter during a blizzard. All we knew was rock-hard ice and crusty snow for weeks. As the first warm days arrived, both boys wanted to spend as much time outside as possible. We quickly discovered gumbo.

One Saturday after lunch, younger son wanted to go out to play before anyone else was ready. He put on his sweater and coat and mittens and boots and headed out the door with strict instructions to stay in our yard.

Quite a bit of time had gone by when we heard knocking at the back door. Our next-door neighbor, Bernetta Younger, was standing on the deck holding younger son at arms length -- with no boots on.

"He was trapped in your garden," she said.

When I looked down toward the garden, I could see about an inch of his high-top red boots above the mud. Small footprints went from the deck directly to the garden. Younger son had walked into the gumbo and got stuck.

For some reason, younger son always called Bernetta "Mr. Younger," which is what he called her husband too. No one knows why.

Younger son's version of his garden entrapment was simple: "I called and called for you to come, but Mr. Younger saved my life."

And then he hurried off to play with the Legos in the non-gumbo safety of the family room.

Weeks later, we were able to retrieve the boots, which served as mute reminders that a trip into the garden is the last thing you want to make during mud season.

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