The bite of winter... (some humor)
EDITOR's NOTE: With the bite that winter has placed on much of the U.S. including central and northern portions of Appalachian in the first couple of weeks of this year, I hope this column will pass with most as humor...
I was talking back in October with 'Tater Clodpuster about the impending arrival of cold weather.
Tater is an optimist.
"We'll live," he said. "I think it'll be colder this winter than the stare I got from Lizzie Ann's Justus' mother when I brought Lizzie home 15 minutes late from the church social back in 1938," Tater said. "But we'll make it. It won't be the worst winter we've had."
Tater explained that Lizzie was his first girlfriend and said that he'd always suspected Lizzie's mom of being a witch.
I met Tater when I gave him a ride back in early October. At the age of 77, Tater was hitch hiking from Bradshaw, West Virginia, to Bearwallow, just on the other side of the state line in Virginia. He climbed into my car near Pea Patch, on the state line road that forms much the boundary between Buchanan County, Va., and McDowell County, W. Va.
(For those of you not from around here, Bearwallow is a ridge line community in the Jewell Ridge area, north of Richlands, Va., in Tazewell County, and it's pronounced "bear waller"; Bradshaw is in McDowell County, W. Va., about 20 or so miles away.)
"You young people don't know what cold really is," Tater told me.
And he then went on to recount at length several of the coldest winters in history - all of which took place before I was born and in areas where records are kept inadequately - if at all.
"I remember the winter Aunt Mabel's water box froze slap solid," he told me.
His Aunt Mabel, as best I could make out, lived back then in the bottom of a holler somewhere between Bandy and Amonate in the more rugged portion of Tazewell County where Virginia and West Virginia start to meet. And the water box in question was a 1,200-gallon tank set into the ground in Mabel's backyard and filled by a spring that bubbled up on the property.
To hear Tater tell it, he was about eight when the surface of the water in the water box froze up one night. When they came out the next morning the little trickle of spring water was flowing over the frozen surface and out of the tank at the other end.
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