Winter (and Life) pack a punch

It looks like Ol’ Man Winter threw a sucker punch to most of our nation.

Some areas of the country ducked and dodged previous storm systems that blew through, coming out of it with a few scrapes of the snow shovel or pouring a little salt on the ice wounds.  Other areas kept getting smacked with a strong left hook.

But the recent blast of wintry weather caught many unaware; that sucker punch knocked some regions down for the count.

Last night I read my friend Homesteadrambling’s blog and viewed a couple of her pictures of the latest snow storm in her neck of the woods.

My family and I used to live in that section of the country and we experienced eight winters there.  But not once in all those years, do I recall scenes like I viewed online.

Hubby and I watched a slide show of storm photos from the Midwest.  One major highway that we traveled along often was completely shut down in a whiteout blizzard condition.  I read about a young lady forced to spend the night on a stranded bus in Chicago because she couldn’t see more than 100 feet when she attempted to walk home.

Some of my family and friends live in a southwestern state.  They too were caught by winter’s sucker punch as evidenced by their pictures on Facebook.

Again my family once lived there also and we remember how a dusting of snow sent those “sooners” into a frenzy.  In the land where the wind comes sweeping down the plain, evidently the wind swept several inches of snow and ice into their yards.

All of this reminds me of a woman I once worked with years ago when I was a young reporter/assistant section editor at a daily newspaper.  Mrs. Carter was our newsroom librarian.

Long before the internet surfaced, she was our capable and efficient go-to gal for information.  She was an older lady, sweet-natured with a well-worn face and hands.  I suspect that in her youth, she worked long and hard hours on the farm out in the sun-scorched weather.

Her duties were to catalog….everything!  If we needed a picture that our photographers could not easily attain, we asked Mrs. C. to find us one.  And voilà!  She dug through her carefully alphabetized files and found the picture you needed.

Need some background info or a copy of a photo one of our photographers took five years ago?  See Mrs. C.  Need to know who wrote an article about such and such on this date or that?  Our steadfast librarian had gigantic volumes of the actual newspaper pages bound and shelved for your perusal, as well as countless volumes on “microfiche.”

Mrs. C. was an information treasure trove hidden in a backroom office away from the hustle and bustle of the newsroom.  This gem of a lady also possessed the best attitude no matter what.  To this day over 30 years later, one of her oft-spoken phrases has stuck with me.  “My, we are having a time!” she would utter.

She didn’t qualify whether it was a good time or a bad time, a glorious time or a devil of a time.  A gut-wrenching time or a giddy time, a pleasing time or an irritating time.  To Mrs. C., it was always just “a time.”

Today on this third page of Chapter Two in my book, Opportunity,  I glance out at the snow knowing  friends, family and fellow countrymen are digging themselves out of winter’s throes, attempting to land on their feet again, and I sympathize.

Although we were spared the worst from this storm’s sucker punch here in Mama’s Empty Nest, our family has taken a few unexpected hits on the chin this winter in other areas of life.

But for all of us, I just have one thing to say, “My, we are having a time!”

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