It’s the middle of November here in beautiful, crime-free Iuka and it’s already too cold for me to be expected to attend any event where I’m not contractually obligated to show up. The City of Iuka held its Veterans Day parade this past Saturday. The high was 38 degrees. My thought was, “Haven’t we asked enough of our war veterans?”
The forecast was windy with a slight chance of double pneumonia. Wouldn’t it be better to send our military heroes to Panama City Beach for a long weekend than to make them ride on the back of an open-air convertible on a day where (and I looked this up) Iuka was only 10 degrees warmer than Siberia, Russia? We need to switch Veterans Day out of this occasionally frigid month and into a warmer, fun month. I’m thinking we swap Veterans Day on November 11th with Cinco De Mayo on May 5th. Veterans deserve flip-flop weather. They deserve a day at the lake when the lake isn’t frozen over. Those men held the North Koreans at the 38th Parallel, don’t give them weak hot chocolate - give them strawberry margaritas!
The temperatures are so low that we are a forty-percent-chance-of-rain day away from an epic bread and milk run on Brooks Grocery the likes of which has never been seen. For those of you who are from states that normally see temperatures that go south of forty, first, I’m sorry you had to experience that. In a just world, no human being would have to live any further north than Kentucky. Settlers should have left Ohio and above to the wolves and snow. That way those kids who were too unathletic for football wouldn’t have been forced to play hockey. Anyway, for you Northern transplants, when we Southerners think snow is coming we buy bread and milk in quantities that baffle social scientists. I don’t care if you have lactose intolerance or a gluten allergy, you are going to be chasing that bread and milk with a fistful of probiotics. Seriously, y’all, it’ll be three or four weeks before the shelves get sufficiently restocked so you could make a good batch of French toast.
Another thing former northerners living in and around Tishomingo County need to know about our winters is that, if our community roads ever do get icy, no one who grew up here knows how to drive on ice. Now, that will not stop every man in Tishomingo County from driving on the ice first thing in the morning in an effort to “check out the roads.” The men will do this even if their job has already announced it is closed for the day - that’s just more time to drive on roads you don’t know how to drive on. The men will drive on icy roads and complain about all the “idiots” out there driving on the icy roads. After every good ice storm, expect the county to be down about ⅙ of its mailboxes. And watch out when you are driving on hills because sleds suddenly have the right of way on any snowy incline in Tishomingo County. Local kids will flock over a steep hill covered with snow even on busy roads like Highway 25 like deer if somebody planted corn in the middle of the Natchez Trace. I don’t make the rules, folks, I just try to survive them.
The craziest thing about these cold temperatures may be that it’s just as likely as not to be 65° one day in the next couple of weeks. We are used to wild temperature swings, even if our sinuses are not. I, for one, won’t be taking the next warm weather for granted. Until then, I’m going to make a fire, wrap up in a blanket, and take a nip from my strawberry margarita.