RIVER CITY JOURNAL: THE DEEPER THE SNOW, THE OLDER THE TELLER OF THE TALE

There is probably an equation somewhere that lets you pinpoint a person's age based on how high the drifts were way back when.

Age-advantaged folks tend to be predictable. Their habits are set. Their tastes are unwavering. And their topics of conversation can be lumped into three general categories:

Children and grandchildren (that's one category).

Aches and pains (that's another category).

And the weather.

Even though I don't have grandchildren, I'm pretty sure I qualify as being among the elders.

Remember when you were young, being told to "show respect for your elders" or "mind your elders"? Now that I am one, I appreciate it when I get some respect or someone actually takes my advice.

I know for a fact that I have enough aches and pains to qualify, and my prematurely gray (that's not white) hair is a pretty good indicator that I've been around awhile.

And, lately, I've found myself talking about the weather a lot.

In general, I'm pretty adaptable to the changes of the seasons. I look forward to spring. I endure summer, appreciative of the long evening daylight hours. I relish autumn. But I'm not too keen on winter.

Let me tell you, now that I'm old to enough to have some perspective, that winters in Southeast Missouri used to be milder. When I was growing up, school was rarely called off because of snow.

Yes, we had snow. Ask my sons. They've heard all about walking uphill to and from school and how it always snowed on the first day.

Actually, snow was a novelty in the 1950s and early 1960s in these parts. The biggest snow I remember came in April, so it didn't last long.

Mostly I remember sleet and freezing rain. This was far more menacing than snow, particularly if you lived in a valley in the Ozarks and the only road out went up to the highway on the ridge by way of the north slope of a big hill. This meant the gravel road, once iced over by sleet or freezing rain, stayed that way until a good thaw came along.

In more recent years -- the late 1970s and early 1980s -- saw some pretty big snowstorms hit the area. Over in the Ozark hills, some schools were out for a week at a time, because no one was equipped to handle a lot of snow. And just three or four years ago, Cape Girardeau was walloped with 20-plus inches of snow fairly late in the winter season.

Now. Having said all of that, I know some of you can remember miserable winters that dispute my claim that winters are growing harsher. I don't blame El Nino. I don't know enough about global warming to understand if it is making the planet hotter or colder. I don't know if the development of fatless butter and synthetic fabrics has upset some cosmic apple cart.

But I do know this: If you're in a group of people, you can quickly determine the relative ages of everyone in the group by what they have to say about the weather. Invariably, the worse the storm, the older the speaker. That's because -- I think I have this figured out -- that memories of major weather events tend to expand with waistlines, wrinkles and double chins. So those flurries when you were a child become the Blizzard of '37.

I can't vouch for any of my own memories, much less those of others who are older but more mentally agile than I am. What impresses me about some oldsters is how they can't remember where they left their glasses last night, but they remember how many times they had to crank the Model T before it would start during that terrible winter storm of ... . Well, you get the idea.

I've always been a listener around my elders, and I still enjoy hearing them recollect life as it used to be, even the weather tales. I can only hope that when I'm really old I still have memories -- and can share them with you, kind readers.

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