Hill Country Living
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It’s early Monday morning and today is predicted to be The Great Melting Day. Temperatures will rise above freezing and the several inches of rock-solid ice that covers this entire county will return to its much preferable liquid state. By the time this column is published, I imagine the Sleetpocolypse ‘24 and all the collective trauma it literally rained upon us will be a distant memory.
But lest we forget, let’s recap. What follows is a list of things I did this past week to pass the time. While imprisoned in my ice house and wandering through the days in an unsorted, ghostly state that felt like some arctic afterlife, I watched a lot of birds. My grandmother would be proud. The bird feeder outside my kitchen window was a prime source for entertainment for me and I saw every bird in existence. A parrot could have appeared and I wouldn’t have been surprised.
The birds probably began to consider me something of a stalker on, say, their eighth full day of seeing my lonely face beaming through the window, eager for any sort of connection. I knew it was time to take a step back when I was showing signs of personal contempt toward individual cardinals for their greediness.
Another thing I did was knit an entire sweater. The whole thing. It’s very ugly and I’ll never wear it, but I knitted it with the fervor of someone getting paid by the stitch which I most certainly was not.
I also did a lot of low-impact yoga via YouTube videos which made me feel very cheesy because I’m not so much into embodying my third eye and connecting to my inner essence, but I do like to not feel cramped up. Then after the YouTube yoga video I’d watch a YouTube true crime video about murder and kidnapping to round out the entire experience.
Other than birds/sweaters/yoga/kidnapping, I scrolled social media a lot. Like, A LOT. I think it gave me brain damage and my phone-time purge starts today. Too bad you can’t just scroll backwards to un-see it all.
I was wrong last week when I predicted that the kids in town would be disappointed in the quarter-inch of sleet that had been delivered at the time of my writing that column. A few hours passed, the sleet excelled in its miserable delivery and the kids of Water Valley had a blast. Three little girls on Wood Street sledded past my house no less that 40,000 times. And the youngest one of them let out the cutest little scream of absolute joy each and every time she made a lightning-fast sled run, secure in her dad’s lap. It was all so wholesome.
My own kids disappeared into the gleaming, ice-covered hills of this town and I barely saw them for five days. A friend of mine looked out of her window at sunrise one morning to see my youngest kid sledding down Panola at 6:45 a.m. He had spent the night with her son and was headed back home to Wood Street for a hot breakfast. What a way to commute!
The kids were out school so long that they probably forgot their ABC’s. But it sure was fun to watch them handle it all so well. We adults may have had a time of it but you can’t keep these country kids down.
