Observations©

By Donald S. Conkey

Date: February 18, 2010 - # 1007 - Title: Be grateful for nature’s beauties on snow days (818/3756)

When is enough enough? When you have two snow storms in Woodstock within in a month, that’s when enough is enough. Yes the snow was beautiful. Our trees and bushes were covered with snow. The bushes looked like cup cakes covered with frosting. The birds were beautiful, especially the cardinals as they sat on the branches of the snow covered trees, or in the Camilla and azalea bushes; and the squirrels were having fits trying to climb the bird feeder. It truly was a winter wonder land, similar to the winter wonder lands I remember as a child in northern Michigan.

But our latest snow storm disrupted a very important date I had with my wife Joan. I was going to take Joan dancing for the first time since my health issues disrupted our dancing date’s years ago. We enjoyed dancing and now I was going to try it again, even if all I could do was stand on the floor, with my cane to steady me, and let Joan dance around me. My new medicine has given me my life back, after nearly ten years. Seniors can not afford to allow America’s medical profession, including the drug companies, to be destroyed. Under the proposed Reid/Pelosi/Obama health plan I would be considered ‘too old and too unproductive’ to receive meaningful health care today.

Our date was going to be in the ward cultural hall, a fancy dinner/dance sponsored and prepared by the Young Women in our congregation. The Young Women were raising money for their summer camp trip and had talked the Young Men of the ward to dress up in white shirts and black ties and be servers for this elaborate affair. This was an adult only affair. But baby sitting was provided for in the building. The Young Women had thought of everything, except the snow.

I wrote about the snow storm, and my dinner/dance date with Joan because as I sat down to write my column on George Washington and Abraham Lincoln’s birthdays it was snowing outside and it was too beautiful not to share – and Catherine Torgersen, President of the Laurel’s Young Woman’s program had just called and told me their program was cancelled until March 13. While it is beautiful outside it was also disappointing to miss this dinner/dance date with my beloved.

The above was written yesterday. It’s now Saturday, and the sun is shining again, and the ice covered roads are melting, with a few cars attempting ‘the hill,’ and making it. But the traffic is slow today – a day to sit beside the fireplace and ponder the beauty God has created for each of us.

This morning, while different from yesterday’s beauty has been equally spectacular, perhaps more so, if that’s possible. The snow covered everything – and stuck to what ever it landed on. The trees and bushes were covered with two to three inches of snow last night. It was still there this morning and I took pictures to remember the beauty. But as the sun rose, and the wind blew and the dry snow began to fall and blow, creating blizzard like snow clouds. It was a beautiful winter-wonderland day to be enjoyed by the fire – roasting chestnuts.

Even the birds and squirrels were striking this morning. They were up early vying for the seed Joan put in the feeders last night, after dark. It is interesting to watch the birds ‘compete’ for the seeds. The bird kingdom is extremely competitive, where ‘size’ determines who is fed first. But, in their eagerness to feed, they ‘spill’ enough seeds to the ground to keep the squirrels and smaller birds happy. Even that selfish robin was back, but the thrashers chased him off quickly.

As Joan and I watched these beautiful natural scenes unfold yesterday, and again this morning, I pondered how far mankind’s comforts have developed, especially here in America, since the 1840s when my great grand parents lived in log cabins, often with only a blanket hanging in the door to separate them from the howling wolves outside in the wilderness; or of my grandparents in the 1880s then living in the Dakotas, in a ‘home’ dug out of the side of a hill with a sod roof and having to dig their way to the barn, through snow banks, to feed the livestock during blizzards. I remember Grandma Conkey telling of how often she burned ‘buffalo chips’ to cook their meals and warm their ‘dugout’ home. These beautiful scenes of nature, a warm fire, along with my memories, remind me of how grateful I should be for the comforts I have today, is spite of how difficult I perceive my life to be.  

But isn’t that what life is meant to be – difficult and challenging to help each of us achieve and succeed while being reminded occasionally of those who made our comforts possible today?