RAYMO’S RAMBLINGS – I LOVE A GOOD BLIZZARD
I LOVE A GOOD BLIZZARD
Yesterday was April 14th and usually this time of year people are outside enjoying the sunshine with fifty and sixty-degree weather. But not this year. Yesterday we had a full blown blizzard. Now, I know I am definitely in the minority on this subject, but I love a good blizzard no matter what time of year it is. I have mentioned this before, but winter is my favorite season. I could do winter year around. I’m not too popular of a guy when I mention that.
There is something about a blizzard that just makes me happy. Mother nature is at its best when the wind is blowing thirty miles per hour and the snow is coming down sideways and you can’t see across the street. You hear the wind howling outside. You find yourself looking out the window often and looking at the street lights to see how hard it is snowing. I enjoy those moments.
I hear people all the time complaining about winter and snow and ice and how terrible it is. I have never looked at winter as being a negative. In fact, a few weeks ago I slipped on the ice and fell down. I crashed hard and really hurt my arm. My arm swelled up and I had a nasty bruise from my arm pit to my wrist. My wife said, “Your arm is broken and you need to go to the doctor.” It was just a bad bruise, but not once did I curse the winter or the ice that I slipped on. When you live in Minnesota you expect those kind of things to happen.
I remember some fun times during blizzards. Once my friend Rodney Hoyles and I jumped in my vehicle and drove around town during a real nasty blizzard that had dropped over a foot of snow in Madison. The drifts in the city streets were huge. Nobody was out driving around but Rod and me. We went crashing through drift after drift on the streets of Madison. We were just two guys enjoying a blizzard!
During another blizzard when I was sixteen years old, our family was visiting relatives in New Richland, Minnesota. I had just got my driver’s license, and my dad purchased my first car from my great aunt. I had to drive the car home to Madison. In those days you didn’t have cell phones or the knowledge of just how bad snowstorms were going to get. My brother and sister jumped in my newly purchased car with me and we left New Richland for Madison. I was really excited to make my very first car trip without my parents in the car with me. It wasn’t snowing when we left, but by the time we reached Hector it was a major blizzard. Luckily, we knew some people that lived in Hector, but didn’t know where they lived. We knocked on a few doors to find out where the Eichens lived and spent the night with them. The next day we made it home safe.
I think it was the winter of 1968 that we had a major, major blizzard that lasted days and drifts were the biggest ever. I remember my dad piling up the snow in our backyard with a tractor. We played on that huge pile of snow for a long time, my brothers and sisters dug tunnels in that snow pile.
I will always enjoy a blizzard even in April! Embrace it!
