The Winter of Our Discontent

This winter will certainly go down in the Annals of the Bizarre here on the Row…a confounding conflagration of calamity…a sheit-storm of Really, Universe? Really?!?

Take the weather. Last week, on the day of The Great 2012 Tuneup (see previous post), it was a sun-soaked, record-breaking, 62-degree day in Sioux Falls. I could have sunbathed in my bikini on the veranda of the Heart Hospital, though that might have been too much (literally & figuratively) for a few too-fragile hearts, scaring them into permanent OFF. 


We’ve had very little snow so far, and the landscape remains mostly brown and gold. No icy roads, no white-out blizzards, no waiting for Tractor Man to dig us out. Corn-fused pea-boys are out fanning their half-grown tail feathers (they won’t have fully grown new “trains” until spring) in the faces of bewildered peahens. And I should be celebrating Mother Nature’s beneficence, but I recently read that the incidence of depression actually increases in northern climes during unusually mild winters, since there’s no snow to reflect what little SAD-preventing light we count on up here. Time to break out the full-spectrum bulbs and vitamin D.

Or take our peaflock. By mid-summer we had 29 peacocks—18 adults and 11 chicks. Then came The Marauder(s). Over the next few months, peas began to disappear. Or we’d come home to a half-eaten carcass. The first couple grisly scenes made us think it was a furry predator. Then we woke to a pile of cleanly-plucked feathers below a tree branch, which  made us think it was a raptor or very big owl. Then finding three or four headless but otherwise intact peabodies (I found the most recent headless peahen today) made us think raccoons. I finally decided that a local thug-critter got word out that the Row is a free, all-you-can-eat pea smorgasbord—a peaffet—and that we’re completely surrounded by predatory wildlife. So I did what any rebel farmwife would do: I wrapped the Roosting Tree with blinking Christmas lights. This strategy worked for a few days, until a squirrel chewed through the wire (paid off by the coyote down the road, I’m sure). Anyway, we’re down to 13 adult peacocks--not a single surviving summer chick. Some well-meaning friends suggest that Mother Nature simply knew I was in way over my head and “helped” me restore balance. But that’s a net loss of 16 peas in ONE season! So while I’m not a violent person, I’m now shopping for a patio duck blind/paintball gun combo.

Back to The Great 2012 Tuneup. In addition to Ray’s heart nudge (“attack” sounds so deliberate), my friend’s surgery to remove what she calls a “non-benign visitor” from her colon, and my other friend’s mom ending up as Ray’s roomie down the hall at the Heart Hospital, my oldest brother has had at least three surgeries on his eyeball this winter to repair (and repair and repair) a detached retina. This is unsettling because (1) he’s in Ecuador, where I can’t just pop over to help out, (2) he has to spend most of his time face-down and isn’t supposed to use his eye for a while, and (3) he makes his living working mostly as an online travel writer, which is hard to do if you’re not supposed to LOOK at anything. Then, Mom had to have a couple of teeth pulled. Dangerous, because I know a person can only stand so much blended split-pea soup before he or she loses it completely and starts trying to train his or her little dog to sing “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Amid all this, I had to keep plugging away to get ready for a new semester. Also, since about New Year’s, I’ve had the South Dakota Respiratory Plague, which means my best friends are Emergen-C, Advil, Puffs, Nyquil, chicken soup and my heating pad.

It's not one stressful event that does us in; it's the pile-up, when we don't have enough time between stressful events to recover or rally. So I’ve been in a sort of stunned pre-hibernation mode lately. I've been “closing ranks,” as my Mom would say. Holing up. Hiding out. Yes, I know there are bigger things going on out there in the Great Wide World and I may be thinking a little too locally. Yes, I know it’s only January. And yes, I know Jack Blizzard’s probably in Wessington Springs right now, having a beer and plotting on his bar napkin a trajectory that will lead him directly to our door. But for now, if I don't answer my door or my phone, it's because I'm curled up in a blanket-wrapped ball, knitting peacock chain maille and contemplating what surely will continue to be one mighty strange winter.