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Blog 487 – 12.06.2016
My Birthday Package Finally Arrived

On Sunday morning I awoke in Mineral Point, Wisconsin with approximately two inches of snow on the ground and with it still coming down most of the day. I had requested the snow for my birthday two weeks ago. Sometimes the Universe picks a different delivery date for those important packages to arrive, but it is always the right time.

Some of my earliest and fondest boyhood memories are of when snow came to Chattanooga, Tennessee, the city of my birth and my hometown till my eighteenth birthday when I ventured out into the wider world to serve my country in the U.S. Army. I told someone Sunday morning that when I awoke to snow that I was a boy again in a winter wonderland. I recall with joy every time that I ever saw snow. One very vivid memory involves my being sick and at home with tonsillitis, which was always good for a few days out of school up until I had them taken out at fourteen years old. As little boys and girls do, I loved eating snow and so more than once I snuck out of the house in my pajamas to eat one of nature’s most delicious winter treats against the advice of both my pediatrician and my mom. But what did they know, it felt so cooling on my throat, and I enjoyed it much more than the penicillin shot in my hiney. The doctor swore it was the penicillin that made me well but I am still not so sure it was not the snow that did the trick. Snow has always had a way of brightening my day and widening my smile.

Even the remote possibility of snow in the forecast buoys my spirit. And, I know, many of you beach bunnies do not share my love of cold snowy days. I love sunny beaches and beach bunnies too, in mid-summer but not in December through March at least. My mother hated winter and she had her reasons. Life was harder for her during the winter months as it is for many who are unable for whatever reason to prepare for it. The first English colonists in New England would have surely starved that first winter had not the First People,  I like that term so much better that Indians or Native Americans, come to their rescue, or so the story goes. And the next year after harvest, just before winter set in, a winter they were prepared for, they partied together, the first and the second people. Too bad, that particular party didn’t last and that all too soon the second people forgot that the instrument that their God used to saved them that first winter was the first people. Though they continued to thank God every year they failed to remember those who were here first and who had made their lives in this new world possible. How quickly we forget a kindness and how long we remember a grievance real or imagined.

It snows a lot in New England. I have even thought of settling there when my traveling days are done, if that happens before I am translated, before I graduate, before this body stills and this spirit which is the real me flies. Then I will be traveling first class. New England is tempting but I still would like to live where I could look out my window year round and see snow capped mountains. Unless we make some real strides to prevent continued man-made global warming, I may have to find a place near the Canadian Rockies or bunk in with Santa at the North Pole to be able to see snow year round.

For the time being I am enjoying my belated birthday gift and ever hopeful that there will be several more deliveries of the white stuff before my work assignment in Wisconsin comes to an end. Let it snow. Let it snow. Let it snow.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White