Dexter Iowa Community Site

Consider this quote from Abe Lincoln

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

The first snow fall of the year always comes as a shock to me. It’s not as though I’m not used to it, but it never quite seems to be the picturesque postcard kind of snow that we like to have around Christmas time. Instead we get some sort of crazy Armageddon like snow fall that comes with winds that not only penetrate any small crack in the walls of the house, but tend to send anything that isn’t nailed down in the next county.

I really don’t have many recollections of storms as a child. Oh sure, there were great snows which kept us out of school and even placed huge drifts across the farm yard for us to play in. Of course when we got a little older we learned that drifts also meant lots of shoveling, which never seemed to be as much fun as it was when we were little and shoveling tunnels in the snow.

Most of the big storms I remember were the ones I drove through when I was much more daring than I am now. There were a few times when I was employed driving a delivery truck that I spent a few late nights on the road trying to get home, including one crazy afternoon starting home from Churdan and not arriving until around 10 p.m. Oh sure there were some fun driving adventures in snow storms, but as I get older driving in the snow is starting to rank right up there with walking on ice, neither of which are very much fun and tend to remind me just how human I really am.

So when the weather man said this weekend if it wasn’t necessary for me to travel, then travel I did not. No, I stayed home and sat in front of the television under a warm blanket and just watched the snow fly by the window. No reason for me to be taking chances with my life at my age I thought.

I read the other day stories of the Armistice Blizzard and a few accounts of blizzards from the late 1800s and it still amazes me today to think about how very unconnected we were as a society back then. In today’s super connected age, we can log on, dial up and tune in twenty four hours a day to the latest weather reports, forecasts and up to the minute storm totals. It takes us just minutes to pour over the data that is at hand, and to come to a split second decision on what the weather will be doing. It’s kind of our thing in a way. We’re from Iowa and being mindful of the weather is not only the one thing we Iowans have in common, it is in a way almost something that comes to us instinctually.

Ask anyone you see during the day and they will probably be able to tell you not only what the weather is like out right now, but also what the 3, 5 and 10 day forecasts look like. It is for this reason I wonder what caused people to wander out this weekend. In fact there were enough people who either were not paying attention or just didn’t care, driving into the ditches around Boone county that the county made it known that unless you were bleeding or on fire they wouldn’t send someone out to get you. Crazy huh?

Anyway, regardless of how you spent the weekend or how the snow fall comes down, I’m sure there will be more snow falls this year to talk about (although let’s hope for not as many or as much snow as last year), and it looks like it will be a white Christmas after all. I think I’m going to make a cup of cocoa and sit here in the warmth and just watch the flakes come down. Be careful out there.

See you next week…remember, we’re all in this together.