Southern Winters, Southern Women
Southern winters are a lot like Southern women: Observations from the other side of the woodstove.
Southern winters are a lot like Southern women I have known: provoke them, and they can come at you bone-chilling cold one day, with dark, threatening clouds that can bring down trees and power lines with their iciness; then burn you like a fat-lighter-pine fire the next. But most of the time, they are quite pleasant.
I could elaborate on this analogy from my vast and varied premarital experiences with Southern belles, but my wife has provided me with a list of topics that I am forbidden to write about and, strangely enough, the topic of “other women” tops the list. So, I will settle for discussing Southern winters in more detail, and my wife’s abnormal winter behavior in particular.
If you have ever experienced a winter up north, then you may expect a cold front that arrives in October or November, blows in six to eight feet of snow, shuts down entire city grids, and doesn’t melt away until the full moon of May. If only Southern winters were that simple and consistent.
Southern winters are wildly unpredictable and don’t play by any rules. Here in the South Carolina Lowcountry, for example, temperatures can range from the 80s to the 20s within just a few days. You can catch heatstroke on Monday, and hypothermia and frostbite on Wednesday, but by the weekend the weather will be perfect for fishing on Saturday and the church’s Sunday outdoor picnic-on-the-grounds.
The John Deere farm thermometer on my front porch reads almost 80 degrees here in southern Hampton County, S.C., even as my spigots are still dripping to protect them from last night’s freeze. Yesterday, the town tramps and trollops were wearing cutoff long johns, fur coats and warm, furry slippers; today they are back in flip flops and Daisy Duke cutoff jeans.
To compound our Southern misery, it can freeze every night for a week straight and when it thaws you’ll still have flies, gnats and mosquitoes crawling up your britches legs and going after your “sugar” spots, as one of my cheeky old great-aunts used to call her unmentionable regions.
After surviving 50 South Carolina winters, I have also noticed that erratic Southern weather causes equally erratic Southern behavior, particularly among the females. For those of you with an interest in both meteorology and abnormal psychology, you know you are in the midst of a Southern Winter if:
- You and your wife of many tender years have your first big fight, but it is not about abuse, adultery, drinking, money or gambling, but over control of the thermostat and that damned heavy weighted blanket.
- Every pregnant female animal on the farm decides that the midst of a winter storm is the perfect time to give birth. Even animals that you didn’t know were pregnant start spitting out cute, but vulnerable babies. Of course, to protect these weak and wobbly creatures, your animal-loving farm wife insists that you brave the elements and spend the entire frigid day building hay-filled shelters for each adorable babe. Don’t be surprised if some of your old clothing disappears from your closet, husbands, only to be found later, wrapped around a newborn.
- OR EVEN WORSE, your wife insists that every dog, cat, houseplant, potbelly pig, chicken and goat come inside to spend the night, and you end up sleeping on the couch with all the animals. And apparently the goat likes to snuggle and nibble on your ears, which is not as bad as it sounds after you’ve had a few hot toddies of whiskey.
- Your wife insists on cooking her cold-weather favorite, five-alarm chili with onions and beans, then gets furiously offended at some of the new greenhouse emissions that come from your body and won’t let you sleep in the same room with her, as if it is your fault. But methinks the lady doth protest too much, if you know what I mean.
- Just let the TV meteorologists in Savannah or Charleston say the words “winter storm” one time, and everyone in your small town freaks out and rushes to the Piggly Wiggly grocery store to stock up for world’s end or “Ice-maggedon” or whatever the overzealous national media decides to call it. And when it all blows over you’re stuck with a freezer full of leftover chili, nine loaves of moldy bread, four jugs of sour milk, and a closet full of bottled water and toilet paper.
- Despite warnings to stay off the dangerous highways, my wife loves to ride around – or should I say slide around – on the icy roads to gaze and gawk at the snow, which is something we almost never see in the Deep South; then she call her siblings and cousins, who have been waiting all year to fire up their four-wheel drives and ATVs and pull hapless people out of ditches.
- You have to break the ice in the hog trough so the cows and pigs can get water, but you tell your wife it’s still too hot to clean out the gutters or paint the house.
- You must leave your outdoor spigots dripping overnight to avoid freezing, but you forget one and that’s just enough to freeze and burst. This causes a beautiful, sparkly geyser of water to spray over a ten-foot radius and threats of divorce that spray pretty much everywhere else because some wives can’t take a “nice hot bath and relax like a civilized human being.”
I could continue, but the TV weatherperson says there is a 20-percent chance we’ll get sleet and a few sprinkles of snow tomorrow night, so I’ve got to run to the Piggly Wiggly and stock up on a bunch of perishable goods and TP and then go drip my spigots - all but one. It won’t kill that woman to go one day without a hot bath.
I’ll leave you with a parting quote, almost verbatim from one of my favorite poets, the aptly named Robert Frost.
“Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice. But I say it will end when a Southern woman gets control of the thermostat and then feeds that huge pot of chili to the dogs and that stupid goat…”