Saturday, November 15, 2008

Mud Season Again

Ev used to tell me that there are three seasons in Southern Illinois ... winter, summer and mud. It's not true. There are actually four seasons:

Winter

Warm Mud

Summer

Cold Mud

This would be Cold Mud season. It's been raining for days and the temperature has been steadily falling. Today dawned cold and drizzly and progressed to cloudy, gray and windy with a high of about 38 degrees. The world outside is a miasma of thick, schmucky, mud dotted with big puddles and covered over with a growing mat of wet, fallen leaves that were pretty two weeks ago but are now a layer of soggy mulch. They say we could get snow flurries tonight, but I just want stuff to stop falling out of the sky.

This is a season you can only truly appreciate if you've lived in the Midwest. God knows, I had no idea when I was an Arizonan, bitching about the 90 degree temperatures while all my friends east of the Mississippi were chillin' in front of their fireplaces.

Now I understand. The fireplace is not there for ambience.

Brrrrrr.

4 comments:

Feral Mom said...

You realize a season of "cold mud" is not likely to entice me back into Illinois' embrace, right? On the other hand, it was frakkin' 90 degrees today in L.A., so the thought of snugglin' up in front of a fireplace with a hot chocolate has a certain appeal.

Thanks for dropping by the other post...I've missed you guys! And yes, I'll have to give Southern IL a shot sometime--after all, it's only fair.

Kwach said...

Woo! Feral, it's good of you to come slumming over here!

(And hot chocolate my ass ... I read your blog. Maybe a hot buttered rum?)

: )

Anonymous said...

Shit's been falling out of the sky up here, too, but we have grass and stuff to keep the mud in check. It DOES keep getting colder though so we're very much attracted to fire and numbing beverages

Kwach said...

Ah, you see, XUP, we've got grass, too ... everything here is covered in grass. It's very deceptive, because it looks like grass and there's every reason to believe it will behave like grass ... until you put weight on it (like a car, or a foot, f'rintance). That's when you find out that it's all built on a thick layer of mud.

We're very close to sea level here, and our fertile soil is like a sponge that has already absorbed all it can. Anything extra turns to mud.