The following are finalists who are being considered to become the Tribune’s new weekly columnist based on reader feedback. Please send your thoughts about the columnists to Managing Editor Sarah Stultz by email at sarah.stultz@albertleatribune.com or by mail at 808 W. Front St. in Albert Lea. Please clarify in your comments whether your remarks are intended to be printed as a letter to the editor or simply read by the Editorial Board. Comments must be received by Saturday.

 

Guest Column by Linda Peterson

 

It’s raining, it’s snowing, the next thing you know, it’s blowing — and blowing and blowing.

After making our way through most of December and half of January fairly weather-event-free, some of us thought we were going to slide through winter. Slide is the operative word. Others of us knew better. When we had the nicer, unseasonable weather it was not unusual to hear, “We’re gonna pay for this!”

Ya gotta wonder when the bill is gonna be paid up. I mean, really.

Jan. 18 dawned with a snowstorm dumping something like 10 inches of snow. Schools and everything else not deemed absolutely necessary were closed.

Yes, indeed, if we had any doubts, we are, in fact, in Minnesota.

That snowstorm was followed within 10 days by another 7 1/2 inches of snow.

Then we were hit with something called the polar vortex. This plunged us into below-zero temperatures for long enough to make us think we never would thaw out. And it just keeps snowing.

Over time,winter weather has instilled in me a feeling of dread.

While this season lends itself to some truly inspiring scenes, I prefer                                                                                 to view them from within a warm shelter, preferably with a warm cup of coffee or tea in hand.

But, for those of you who think we’ve never been down this road before, let me fill you in: One winter, I believe it was in the ’80s, we got a snowstorm every Friday in January. This effectively sealed us in for the weekend.

We came to know that we’d better get to town for the needed supplies ahead of each predicted storm.

Another time, after a snowstorm, we were scheduled to load out hogs to the local packing plant. By the time the truck was to arrive at the farm, the snowplow hadn’t yet arrived. To assure the truck’s entry to our place, my husband used his trusty 4440 John Deere with a bucket to clear our quarter-mile gravel road of waist-deep snow.

On yet another occasion, I was working as a home health aide when another snowstorm came up. I was working a couple of cases about 20 miles from home when I got a frantic call from my husband, telling me how quickly the storm was developing on our end of the county.

By the time I got headed home in my trusty Citation, visibility was next to nothing. I don’t think I would have made it home but for following the tail lights of a neighbor in front of me.

After I got home and pulled in the garage, I found I had plowed so much snow it was packed around everything under the hood. It took quite awhile to dry that car out.

Then, there’s the memory of the Halloween ice storm. As the last of our few trick-or-treaters arrived that night, a cold, icy rain was coming down. Before long, we watched as our electric lines sagged with an icy coating. Then the winds came up, causing those same lines to gallop and touch, causing the first of our electric outages.

Overnight, our entire county became a sea of broken lines and downed power poles. Generators were at a premium for those who could get to the stores, over iced-over roads, to buy them.

The only heat we had came from a Kerosun heater placed on the hearth of our non-functioning fireplace. The heater was our only way to heat a very limited amount of food and coffee.

We piled on layers of clothes and dug out every quilt and blanket we could find. But we were more fortunate than most. Because our electricity came from a different provider than most of the rest of the county, it was restored in a day and a half.

Some of the area was without electricity for a week, in some extreme cases, 10 days. Extra electrical crews, brought in from wide areas of the country, worked around the clock to repair the extensive damage to the area-wide electrical system. In some cases, this took weeks, if not months.

Do I like winter? Not so much.

Linda Peterson is a retired farmwife who has written columns for a Glenville-Emmons paper and is working on a memoir.