The Kudzu Files

Red Sky At Night...

sunset_clouds, originally uploaded by staryeti.

Red sky at night.... these clouds were flooding the room with a red glow late Tuesday afternoon.

OK, This Is Ridiculous!

Late Stormy Afternoon

Thunder and lightning rolled all evening just south of us, but never actually moved over us.

Morning Comes

The first few minutes of my morning walks are always tough. But when I get out early enough, about 10 minutes into the walk I come to an open area that sometimes gives me a sight like this, and makes the walk much better:

It's Cold!

It's 9:30 Friday morning, and it's 24F outside. It's been cold for a couple of days now, since the temperature plunged from 55F to 35F in 30 minutes late Wednesday afternoon. Since it went below 32F around 7PM Wednesday night, it hasn't gotten above freezing. OK, I know some of you live in northern states like Illinois and Wisconsin and Utah and Canada, and you guys have cold weather all the time, like from September until June. That's your problem. I can't help that. Here's the deal - it's cold here! And in Mississippi, that creates a bit of a problem. See, we really don't know what to do about it. We have this vague idea we should put on a coat. For most of us, that coat is something akin to a lined windbreaker. So we do that, and we're still cold. Some of us even think a hat should be involved, but for most Mississippians, a hat means a baseball cap with 'Mississippi State' or 'Ole Miss' written on the front, or maybe "John Deere". And so we put that on, and we're still cold. And I'm talking about temperatures of 40 degrees! So, when the temperature goes below freezing, and stays there, the result is a sort of weather anarchy. And two things happen: you go wrap rags around your outdoor water faucet, because mama called and asked if you had done that, and then you go to the grocery store and buy lots of food. It's like a funeral, when Southerners don't know exactly what they should do, they start cooking. We may freeze, but the people who find us will eat well. Beyond that, we're pretty much at a loss. We stop doing anything outside, other than racing to our cars if we do have to go somewhere. We turn the heater up and huddle under blankets, like survivors of some Ice Age catastrophe. And we wonder why anybody in their right mind would live north of Memphis.

Dry no more

T.S Matthew jumped up from the Gulf late in the week, and since Friday night he's brought a soaking rain to central Mississippi. Rain that we badly needed. I'm writing this holed up in the screen porch I built a few years ago. It's a perfect Sunday afternoon - I've got a small TV to watch the football games, a chaise lounge to kick back on, a good book to read when I decide to ignore the game for a while, and it's just cool and breezy enough that a light blanket feels good. But what I've been listening to the past hour or so is the sound of a raint autumn afternoon. And it's a complex set of sounds. The most obvious is the rain hitting the metal roof of the porch. But there are other strains playing in this symphony. The muted plunks of rain hitting soggy ground. The lighter sounds of rain on leaves. The wind blowing through those leaves. The drip of rain off he roof into the puddles that have formed. Ths splashing of rain on the surface of the goldfish pond beside the porch. And the deeper sound that somes when a stronger wind blows through more distant trees. If I concentrate, I can almost focus on one strain, but then the wind or rain picks up, or both, and the individual strain recedes again. Diminuendo, Crescendo. Perfect Sunday afternoon.