Wierd weather

When you live in the Midwest, you'll hear someone talking about "this crazy weather" practically any year, at any season, but especially during spring. It always seems either unseasonably hot, cold, wet, dry, or windy. This year it seems as though the weather just can't decide what it wants to do. It's common, in Missouri, to hear someone say, "It's no wonder everybody's sick! Hot one day, cold the next!"

As if that would make people sick. Oh yeah, I'm high-and-mighty now that I've gone through the winter without so much as a sniffle.

If it weren't for Cliff wanting to go for a motorcycle ride so badly, perhaps I wouldn't notice. He'll look at the forecast and see a 70-degree Saturday ahead. Ah, there's our window of opportunity. What happens, though, when the temperatures shift from thirties to seventies that fast, is wind. Strong, gusty wind. It isn't impossible to ride a motorcycle on a windy day, but forty-mile-per-hour gusts sure take some of the fun out of riding. I see this morning that the temperatures forecast for today have changed overnight, too. Where they were saying seventies, now they're saying sixties. The sunny skies forecast yesterday have changed to overcast.

This takes me back to spring of 1967. We had the same sort of weather pattern. I was moody and pregnant with my son. We were living on my parents' property in a mobile home, and Cliff had decided to try his hand at gardening for the first time ever, with my daddy showing him the ropes. Somewhere along in May, there came a hard freeze, which froze Cliff's potato vines to ground level. He was devastated; of course they came back, but he wasn't happy with the set-back.

My son was born May 10, and the below-normal temperatures went on and on. It seemed like forever that I had to bundle the kid up as though it were November.

Speaking of May 10, there was a year some time in the late 1970's when we had a frost and hard freeze on that date (I remember the date because it's my son's birthday). I had lots of things up and growing in the garden, and not all of them were frost-tolerant. I put straw over the row of early green beans and some of the tomato plants, and that protected them. But my straw supply (and buckets to put upside-down over plants) was limited, so I took my chances with some things.

Awake the next morning, with temperatures in the twenties, I decided to try something I'd heard or read about. The theory was that if you get out there with a hose before the frost melts and wash the frost off the plants, they'll be fine.

Friends, do not test this theory. What happened was that the water with which I was "washing" the plants froze and made lovely icicles hanging from the leaves of my plants. When the sun came up and the temperatures warmed, the plants turned black, dead as proverbial doornails (where did that expression come from, anyhow?)

But by george, I know better than to try that again!