Cold enough for you?

My maternal grandmother, Lina Manona Sadler Jones, used to tell all 16 of the first cousins who were her grandchildren that you could tell how cold and bad the winter was going to be by seeing how bushy the tails of squirrels were in late September.

I'd been delighted over the last week or so, living in a place awash with squirrels, that most of them looked scrawny and their tails even more so. A mild winter was what I was wishing for.

Then, this afternoon, a creature was down in our back yard.

"What is that thing?" Bern asked, "it's moving too slow for a squirrel."

Then it popped out of one of the plants that are so abundant in our back yards and I realized it was a squirrel that was about as big as a cocker spaniel with a tail the size of a normal squirrel--not a squirrel's tail...a whole squirrel.

So I started thinking about taking up my neighbor Mark (who shares our double wide drive way) about investing in a snow blower. Mark is about 40 and a volunteer fire fighter so he could handle the machine. Maybe he could teach Bern or his high school senior daughter to use it too.

I used to hate the cold and love the heat. People would say to me on a 90 F./90 degree humidity day, "hot enough for you?" And I'd answer, "not nearly hot enough...and how about some more humidity?"

I really did love the heat when I was younger. But I'm not younger any more and actually probably tolerate the cold a bit more than I tolerate the heat.

I'm a spring and autumn guy now--summer and winter, I just put up with because I live in a place that has four seasons.