This winter count(s)

It's called a "winter count," a buffalo hide painting from the Kiowas, the note says, who, like other plains Indians, created a pictoral history to notch their story--their stories, I guess I should say. The etched in image at the top of each of those vertical bars tells reminds the band of that a year's most prominent memory. 

Sadly enough, a century later in Orange City, Iowa, we've got no way to explain what each of the skeletal line drawings is meant to signify. One of them features a man in a black hat--maybe that was the year the Black Robes came around, white man's medicine, the big news of the year.

That sprawling buffalo hide is called a "winter count" because it registers the years, the winters. Let me translate: I'm just a couple of weeks away from celebrating my 75th birthday. Should you ask, I'd say, I'm "75 winters." If you make it through an Iowa winter, you done something of note, brother or sister.

This morning, just outside my window, it's -2 degrees. We're expecting a high of 14, which, for the record, would be significantly warmer than yesterday. 

I can't say enough about how beautiful this winter has been--I mean plenty of windswept drifts perfectly manicured and sturdy as sculpture in the cold, cold air. We've had a week of radiance, the hoarfrost turning the a dusty, dirty rural world into something from Disney. 

But it's been cold. Oh, my, has it been cold. Here's the back yard.

Men and women my age should be shooting pictures of organ pipe cactus somewhere around the Lost Dutchman Mine, not a few dead handfuls of grass against a sea of alabaster. 

Anyway, these pics are not my "winter count," but this morning, as frigid as yesterday's and likely the next, I'm here to say that this winter counts. 

Sheesh. Even the cat has cabin fever.