Do you remember?

I have felt for some time now that my memory is slipping. I seem to be at the point where I can remember things from long ago and forget what happened yesterday. From what I hear from other people, I have lots of company.

Let’s start with the date of the blizzard some years ago where we got 24 inches of snow in February 1979 (?). I hope that date is right. That was really a newsworthy happening. The heavy snow closed the interstate, and we made national news.

I can remember going to a dance that night, and when we started to drive home, the snow began to fall very heavily, so we went on home. It wasn’t long before the first call came in for the wrecker to haul someone out of a ditch. It was a good thing Leonard did not mind going out at that very early hour, and he did not get back to the house until 11:30 on Sunday morning.

I do remember some old-timers from when I was a teenager, and that’s really been a while, telling me stories of the huge snows they experienced when they were young. They told me of fence posts in farmers’ fields that were completely covered with snow, of some cars being almost covered with snow, and of small trees and shrubs being almost flattened by the heavy snow. Some cars were completely covered. And the old-timers insisted such snows happened on a regular basis when they were young.

As I can recall, when I was young, we had regular ice storms, but I do not remember such huge snow storms. However, there have been a few — very few — ice storms of newsworthy reports, one of which broke tree limbs This happened only a few years ago, so I can say definitely I remember people saying they often listened at night to small tree limbs cracking, and some not so small.

I do recall that as a teenager we were exposed on a yearly basis to way too much ice, making it extremely difficult to walk outside. Since we lived on East Main Street in Jackson, we had to maneuver on a long hill if we wanted to go uptown. At that time, the building on the hillside going uptown was the post office, which has since been replaced with a bigger building across the street.

Uptown Jackson is now in the grip of a remodeling project: the roundabout. That might be very interesting if we have another 2-foot snow.

Those of us who have lived in Southeast Missouri most of our lives are somewhat used to strange weather. So what do we do? We accept. For most of my teenage years we lived in an apartment with a tin roof. It made for easy sleep, but did not help in the days before air conditioning.

We have learned to just not be surprised by our weather changes. Makes life interesting.