It is March and I am tired
The calendar indicates that it is Mid-March and I am tired. I waft back in time to Julius Caesar I would like to beware the Ides of March. – the middle. Although the winter of 2018-2019 has been milder than many I have experienced in my time on this orb, I still have grown weary of Old Man Winter’s bony cold fingers around my neck. Many wimps my age flee winter for the sunny climes of Florida or Arizona and I look upon them with scorn. Weaklings! I appreciate and enjoy all four seasons of Indiana weather; I reserve the right to enjoy some more than others.
The interregnum between winter and spring is arduous, grueling. One day it is as warm as a bagel just out of the oven and the next snow spits in my face; one day it is sweater weather the next is Burlington Coat Factory weather. I feel like the man who plods home after working a double shift in the factory making Meineke mufflers – exhausted.
At least in the winter, you can breathe fresh air. In this time when the calendar is pregnant with summer, time drags by like a life sentence in The Big House and the air is different. In this time of gestation you inhale and get air that’s been breathed 43,200,000 times, plus or minus, by the 18,000 people at Assembly Hall and has gone through the diesel engine of a city bus and in and out of a Red Neck Creole restaurant and through a beater of a car loaded with five aspiring members of a garage rock and roll band who are smoking, reeking with the sweat of 15 days between gigs and no shower or clean clothes and through a fleabag hotel where old shoe salesmen lie around in urine-stained shorts and cut some ripe ones and then you get to breathe it for a while, and when you’re so far down on the air chain, it makes you as crazy as a rat in a coffee can. The rat will lie and cheat just to get out.
It is nearly spring here in SoIn-R. [Southern Indiana – Riviera] It is that ugly and treacherous time when winter refuses to quit, like a big surly drunk who heads home and then staggers back for another round and a few more songs that everyone has heard before. It is cold and wet and here we sit day after day waiting. There has been so much rain in the last month that the Army Corps of Engineers has mandated that the Ohio River run 26 hours each day and 34 days this month to move all that water down to New Orleans with good riddance.
It seems that when the scabs of winter are in place and healing some irresponsible spiteful malcontent picks those scabs off and winter is off and running again. Old Man Winter will not give up. He looks old and tired; his cheeks are filled with fissures like the side of a volcano. His eyes are sunken into their sockets, the flesh beneath them puddle and yellow, a candle burned too low; unsmiling. He stands with one foot in January and the other in March, refusing to move.
Hear me roar, “Old Man Winter, release me and let me go. I am so tired.”
[Larry Vandeventer. Go to my two websites – Larryvandeventer.com and wjrambler1956.com – and purchase my books. I grew up North of Calvertville and graduated from Worthington High School and Indiana State. Contact me at Goosecrick@aol.com or 812-796-0784]
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