A Miscellany of Cold
As so many other places across the northern hemisphere, it has been bitterly cold here in central Missouri. It has been a struggle simply to keep things going at a very basic level: feeding horses and humans and especially keeping liquid drinking water available for the former. While the low temperatures are not entirely unheard of here, it is highly unusual for them to last unbroken for twelve days at a time, so we are not set up for this kind of deep freeze. Nor for the snow, which continues to cause travel warnings and road accidents across the state.
In fact, having slid off the road myself on day one of this arctic mess, I have been very reluctant to drive in any case. The episode consisted of spinning 180 degrees as I tried to regain control, coming to a stop perhaps thirty feet from a traveling freight train and two feet from a utility pole. So, no, I have not been eager to drive in to town.
Temperatures are expected to rise above freezing for the first time on Friday. It is already much warmer than it was two days ago, when the daytime high only rose to 1F/-17C. But it has been the wind that has made for the most misery, dropping wind chill temperatures to -22F/-30C; and that is now over mostly, for which I am quite happy!
Meanwhile, as all my efforts have gone to just barely keeping up with the weather, I have also written very little. Such pieces as I have written have been brief: in fact, entirely haiku. I give you two here; the first was written shortly after the first storm and the latter is from yesterday as the cold was beginning to break.
Betty on a Cold Evening
Nose up, tail tipping,
fur fluffed, muscles quivering~
she sniffs the blue cold
Haiku After the Storm
Small hurried tracks dust
golden snow this afternoon~
Long cold is ended
And soon perhaps it will be possible to return to watching for spring. Oddly enough, just before all this arctic weather moved in, the season was already so mild that I was beginning to watch for the first flowers. A glimpse of colour inside a stalk of squill flowers led to another haiku. As they are extremely hardy plants, I fully expect to find them continuing on springward more or less undamaged once the snow melts.
First Squill in the Garden
Glint, as bright new eyes
glance upward at rain-grey clouds~
wait winter’s passing