The Colby Echo

Issue date: 2/23/07 Section: Opinions

As an elderly but sweet old man, I spent half of last week listening on the radio or on television to predictions that we were going to get snow like those poor, benighted little towns north of, I think, Syracuse? Rochester? Somewhere that's adjacent to Lake Erie. Those anguished souls have gotten something like 100 inches of "lake-effect" snow in the last couple of weeks.

And so, all the guys on the local channels were telling us to stock extra water and a battery-powered flashlight and radio. If I had had the merest inkling that I would have to cook my meals over a camp stove, I would indeed have panicked. However, everyone knows that I can't cook anything anyhow anywhere. Would the blizzard close The Bread Box?

Well, it closed schools locally and across the state, but people managed to get about. Colby certainly didn't "close"-never has, never will. Waterville got maybe a foot of new snow, but my refrigerator, still purring as the blizzard raged, kept my Longtrail Ale just right. Of course, had the electricity flopped for good, I would have sipped the ale at room temperature. The disappointed weatherpeople couldn't point to a single fatality in all of the Pinetree state.

But the Morning Sentinel splashed headlines on the storm, undercutting their suggestions that this was THE BIG ONE by running a series of recollections about snow 'round here. The observers reminisced about the winter of 1953-54, when you got into the house through the second-story windows. "Hey," they cackled philosophically, "it's Maine. It's sposed to be snowy, eeyah." I won't let those old timers in through MY bedroom window.

The best poem I ever read/heard about snow was composed by my optometrist friend in South Dakota, James W. King. I reprint it in its entirety:

The snow, the snow
Oh, oh

I hope you came through the Valentine's Day blizzard in good shape, ready to find fault with the Diamond Building and cut whole weeks of class to be at Sugarloaf. I'm going to stay home and try to finish the Sunday Crossword in the New York Times. But if you're in the 9 Martin Ave. neighborhood, you could turn the sweet old man into a pillar of sugar by stopping by with a 12-pack of Longtrail.

Even the stranded chickadees would like a gesture like that. I might even have a chickadee party near my bedroom window when the snow gets that high. Don't count on it.

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