Blizzard

     As most of you know, I grew up on a small farm in central IL.  In 1979 we had one of the worst blizzards on record.  My brother and I raised pigs.  That year we had terrible snows, high winds, and HUGE drifts.  I remember a drift that started at the sow pen and built dramaticlly from there.  It reached the height of our two-story farm house. 
    
     I remeber having to dig the sows that climbed the snow drift that had gone over the fence.  They would get just so far up the side of the drift until it would collapse, trapping the 400 pound sows in the drift.  We would dig around them to release them from their frozen shackles, get them back into their pens and dig a trench along the fence so they couldn't get out again.  Some how Mother Nature had a way of repairing that gap and those sows would get out once again.  This was a real pain in the neck.  A pain in the back as well.

     One of those cold snowy winters of the late 1970's was so bad that the snowplows could not push the snow back off the roads well enough to make two lanes any more.  The road just adjacent to ours (the one that now leads to my sister's house) was on a hill and only had one lane.  My mom had to drive up that hill and was hit head on by an on coming pick up.  Just last year she fianlly got the kne fixed that had been banged up more than 30 years ealier.  Talk about long term affects of a snow storm.

     This week we experienced one of those memorable blizzards that will unfortunately stay in our memories for the next 30 years.  For some of us this is the first big blizzard of our life time.  For those of us who lived through those in the late '70's we now have one to compare them to.  I really don't want to remember this one, but at my ripe old age of 46, I do like to think back to those tough winters from years gone by.  Maybe 30 years from now my kids will reminess about this one like I have about those from the '70's.

     I remember having a lot of extra chores to do around the farm just trying to keep the animals alive.  Jake and Sam will probably remember digging tunnels in the snow.  I remember digging out huge snow drifts behind the car so we could escape for a while.  Jake and Sam will have the memory of their mom running the snowblower for the first and only time to make a path from the house to the part of the lane that actually got plowed out.  I remember falling through the ice on the mighty Prairie Creek when my dad told me not to go out on the ice on one of our many days off from school.  Jake and Sam will probably remember their dog, Titus, falling into the creek that streams off of the Mighty Mississippi.  I remember digging a path along the fence line so the sows couldn't get out of the fence.  Sam will remember shoveling 2 feet of snow out of our shoreline man shed.  Connie will probably always remember the fun of being able to stay at home with our boys and playing with them in the snow during the great blizzard of 2011.

     Well this one is pretty much over.  We can pretty much get out of our property.  They do get to stay home from school one more day.  I pretty much have to go back to work.  God has a way of building memories into this thing we call life.  Life is not the breaths we take, but the moments that take our breath away.  The blizzard of 2011 took my breath away.  We have an awesome God.  That's all I have to say about that...pretty much.