No cheer for February
By Jack S. Bray

Pasted somewhere in the scrapbook of my memory, there may be a pleasant February.

There must be, although my random-access recall dredges up only Februaries of unrelieved dreariness. As months go, I have never been partial to February. For one thing, I always have to look up how to spell it. Is it one “r” or two? And where does that second “r” go, exactly?

For another thing, February—weatherwise—is the most disagreeable month of the year. I think February may have been invented to show people who don’t drink what a hangover is like. December generally has enough mild days to take my mind off the weather for a little while. Even if the atmosphere does start to clabber up along about Christmas, it’s not so bad. Winter is still new enough not to be too annoying.

By the end of January, though, winter begins to grate on my nerves, and by the time February gets here, cold weather and constant dampness are doing strange things to my personality. I realize that not everyone is that way. Some people can stand cold weather, and I hear that some people can even stand people who can stand cold weather.

Whoever first figured out the calendar must have felt pretty much the same way I do. You’ll notice that February is the shortest month of the year, and I’d like to think February’s inventor did that on purpose. As a matter of fact, I have read that February originally had 30 days. But they excavated a couple of days from February and tacked them onto July and August. That seems to be going in the right direction, but they stopped too soon. While they were at it, they might have transplanted the entire month to the end of April. A 58-day-long April might let farmers get their corn all planted before May, the way experts have been telling them they should.

On the other hand, with no February, we wouldn’t know how to observe Presidents’ Day, and the Valentine card industry likely would fall on hard times. And tacking February onto the end of April would mean that income tax time would roll around 28 days sooner.

So, maybe we shouldn’t tamper with February a lot more—just be glad it only comes once a year.

Here is the dismal thing—this year, February is 29 days long.


A look at ice from the thaw
By Mitch Jayne

Nobody in Missouri has ever been really sure when the worst part of winter will arrive. The closest anybody has come to that, as far as I know, was George Dunn, who managed a Carp’s Department store in Salem, Mo., back in the 50s. He told me that his one dependable weather prediction was the date when a man named Buford Young came into the store, sailed his stained old summer hat at him, clamped a warmer winter one on his head and walked out without a word. George said that was a good Ozark sign that he’d better send Buford a bill and replenish the store’s woodpile. Winter was about to arrive.

Now this was before TV, much less weather satellites. It was a time when we grabbed at any weather information, even if it was wrong. George said that he even planned his garden on the day Buford came in to wordlessly sling his winter hat at him and snatch up a summer straw. This being Missouri, Buford was wrong as often as he was right, but it was the ceremony of the thing that mattered, not the accuracy. Sort of like the formal way we blame our weather on other states. In north Missouri, ill winds come from Nebraska and Iowa, and in the Ozarks, we blame Oklahoma. We’re just not the kind of state that would start really bad weather what with being satisfied with our own endless varieties.

My old friend Zeke Dooley of Blair’s Creek was a weather prophet we trusted. Zeke never claimed credit but said, “Truth is, my old woman Perletta has the most weathery elbow-hinge in Shannon County, and she’s the oracle. I shelter our stock accordin’ to her elbow. If splittin’ her firewood makes it sore, it’s liable to snow. If she can’t lift a full cream can or half of a deer carcass, it’s likely to come an ice storm. If she gets a sharp twinge in her elbow doin’ some ordinary chore like pitchin’ bales or haulin’ water, then I know we’re in for rough weather—maybe a blizzard—and I’m in for some aggravatin’ work getting the stock in.”

Now, those were the days when weather signs meant something, and we paid attention. We trusted old people’s bones and animal behavior more than science, even leaving long-range winter forecasting to a creature as ornery as a groundhog.

Looking back at a lifetime of Missouri winters, the best I can do is offer you an Ozark rhyme as a recipe for coping with your next ice storm.

Frost’s for storing,
Rain’s for snoring,
Snow’s for staying home.
But ice comes to remind us all,
The humble state we own.

For with all our education,
Our inventions and our skill,
No sage advice can cope with ice,
And likely never will.

Come to think of it, that rhyme might not be from the Ozarks. It sounds more like it’s from Iowa or Oklahoma, those drafty places that send us weather no one can use.

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