Morning Thanks--Winter Count

1" to 4" today, says the forecast. Temp right now, just outside the window is 10.

That's just fine with me. If they've got the bucks to cover it, smart locals our age start thinking about their mobiles in Arizona right about now--if they're not already there. Roads get slick, cars get stubborn, the mud room fills up with stocking caps and wool gloves because we've got winter. 

The museum in town has an old "winter count," a buffalo hide painting from the Kiowas, the note says, who, like other plains Indians, created a picto-history to remember their story--their stories, I guess I should say. Each of those vertical bars represents a particular year's most prominent memory. Sadly enough, we've got no way to understand 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--the 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 months 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, brother or sister.

It's been cold already, and snow has fallen a couple times. The bare-naked fields out behind our place are not snow-covered, but the corn is long gone, and what snow we have runs along in a series of long white stoles. On Monday, eight deer trapsed along behind our place, from the trees across the road on their way to Dunlap--we see them so much more in winter, especially against that white background.

Once--for four years--Arizona was home to us. I'm amazed myself that neither of us have a hankering to spend our Januarys, our winters, down there. Right now at least, early November, I'm all right with winter. "Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow."

By March I'll be sick to death of another lousy, bitter winter, but this morning, 1" to 4" on the way, I'm thankful for the blessed drama of changing seasons.