Words for the season
Why I Love Nebraska
When it's winter in Nebraska,
And the gentle breezes blow
About seventy miles an hour,
And it's fifty-two below,
You can tell you're in Nebraska,
'Cause the snow's up to your butt;
When you take a breath of winter air
Your nostrils both freeze shut.
The weather here is wonderful,
So I guess I'll hang around;
I could NEVER leave Nebraska--
My feet are frozen to the ground.
(Author unknown)
I saw a scrap of this little ditty posted on Facebook and did an internet search to track it down. I found versions for Christmas and New Year as well as winter. I also found the poem adapted to North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Wyoming, Montana, Minnesota, Missouri, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Buffalo, New Hampshire, Maine, Alaska, Canada, and Nova Scotia! I didn't find the author's name, though. I should stop whining about the cold weather we've been having in Kentucky. At least, our temperatures have stayed above zero so far. Here are today's early morning temperatures from Nebraska, according to the National Weather Service. Note that they all start with a minus sign!
Broken Bow: -12° (7:31 am)
Imperial: -12° (7:14 am)
North Platte: -12° (7:45 am)
Valentine: -19° (8:07 am)
Ainsworth: -14° (6:50 am)
Ogallala: -14° (7:10 am)
O'Neill: -13° (6:50 am)
Thedford: -16° (6:50 am)
And the overnight low in Hay Springs, Nebraska: -26°. (Note to Keely and Isaac: Hay Springs is a little town in northwestern Nebraska, a couple towns west of Gordon where my mother grew up and one town east of Chadron where I attended college for a couple of years.)
The bitter cold and the related wind chills put a lot of extra stress on man, beast, and everything mechanical.
7 comments:
Love this poem...have to show it to DH as well as the snow fall in various spots in Neb. It's so interesting to visit the family there since I grew up in the city-love the family values and beautiful landscapes of this area. View out of S-i-l's window on Thanksgiving morning: 100's of wild turkeys.
I love Nebraska and I always will, but after living in Kentucky for nearly 20 years, I think a hard winter up there would just about kill me!
Ha ha! Yes, I have seen this with "Kansas" inserted instead of Nebraska.
My dad grew up in Gordon, NE (just west of the sandhills) and used to tell me about waking up on winter mornings with his hair pomade frozen solid on his bedroom dresser.
I'll bet your dad didn't have any electric blanket to warm the bed before he crawled in, either!
When I was a young teen, my brother and we girls traded bedrooms. He moved downstairs and we moved to the (mostly) unheated upstairs. The furnace was up there, so I'm sure it warmed the air a little, even though there weren't any registers in the upstairs rooms.
I still remember crawling into bed on a winter night and curling into the tightest possible ball I could to get one little spot warm. We never did have anything on the dresser freeze, though!
The expression, "Don't like the weather, than wait a minute" has been applied to multiple places, including Chicago.
John, I think I've heard that applied to every place I've ever lived.
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