Mud

It’s been a horrid and ugly winter on Spring Creek, and it promises to get a lot worse before the first daffodils show their faces.
First, it’s raining. That stuttering, just above freezing, it started just at dark kind of rain. The kind of rain that comes before an unexpected two feet of snow.
Bob Caldwell tried to remain calm before his computer generated graphics on WLOS at lunch time, but you could tell he was scared. He tried to distract everyone with temperatures and barometric readings and high pressures and low pressures, but when the camera went in for a close up, he looked like an animal caught in someone’s headlights. He started to give everyone a song about a nice weekend, then he cracked. "Don’t panic!" he implored his viewers. "If you see flurries after mid-night, don’t panic!" He regained his composure for just a minute and started to talk about a low pressure system over Nebraska, then fell apart completely. There’ll be a Winter Storm Warning tomorrow, he cried, and went running to the back of the studio, howling like a lunatic. As he passed the Sports Desk, he screamed something about accumulations in the northern mountains, and then the screen went blank.
Bob Caldwell used to be the best in the business, and it’s no accident that in these parts "Bob Caldwell says" has become synonymous with "The forecast is." Most of the locals just call him Bob, and there’s no other face they’d rather have on their TV screens when they sit down for supper. He used to be a trusted family elder, and it’s sad to see him reduced to the status of an eccentric uncle who bathes irregularly and mutters to himself while others pose for family portraits.
But it’s not surprising. Not this winter. Cars are rolling over left and right on the back roads, and it’s not because of defective tires. It may have something to do with strong drink, but it may be something in the stars.
Animal carcasses are everywhere. Maybe they’re carcusii. I don’t know. But you can’t walk from your front door to the woodpile without stumbling over the grotesque remains of some animal that wild dogs have drug around. More dead animals line the sides of the roads. Wild dogs chew on them like jackals, and have become so vicious and brazen they no longer hide at the sound of an approaching car.
Some friends had their driveway kidnapped. There was a dispute with a grading contractor over the price of gravel, and he parked his dump truck on the road and refused to move it until the bill was paid. I like to think he had been meditating the night before on the virtues of Martin Luther King, and the dump truck sit down strike was his way of celebrating Black History Month. Somehow, though, I doubt it. More likely, it’s another example of the stupid white trash behavior that I’ve seen a lot of this winter.
Friends have been calling me complaining about their personal relationships, or their room-mates, or their jobs. There are dark clouds hanging over all manner of things this winter.
My blog was accused of being pink.
S** bulldozer hasn’t started in a month.
RM’s washing machine broke.
And a tragedy from my friend M*. She started to give her horse some kind of dietary supplement. For a thick black coat. With luster and sheen. It was supposed to make the animal beautiful. But it didn’t. It turned his hair red.
The Native Americans had some kind of special name for the February moon. I forget what it was. Not The Moon Of Horrid and Ugly Happenstance, but something like that.