Today I'm one day past my 65th birthday. Yesterday Mother Nature laughed and threw a minus thirty-four degree morning in my honor. It's hard to think of ice water being warm, but the colder air temperature hitting patches of open water on the Missouri River created thick clouds of steam that rose from the riverbed and hung so that traffic on the Grant Marsh Bridge had to slow. Once through it, though, the usual speeding cars whizzed by, many of the drivers pressing their ever-present cell phones to their ears. Severe weather conditions used to be a barrier to easy living. We had respect for nature, a fear of winter storms. The recent snow storms in the eastern part of the country caught people unaware, so much so that a fifty mile traffic jam formed on a freeway that stranded people in their cars for more than a day.
It's funny what clouds of steam can do to a 65 year old brain since they took me back to my youth. Clouds of steam rose, too, from the silage pile when the fork tore into it to fill feed pails, steam rolled out of the warm barn when the door opened, steam hung over the water tank after a drinking hole had been chopped into the ice, and when a herd of cows relieved themselves, columns of steam climbed skyward from their puddles and pies.
For whatever happened earlier in the day, one scene stood out the strongest. Driving in the country south of Menoken, a bald eagle flew low across the road, its white head and tail feathers glowing bright white against the gray sky. Eagles could hardly be found in years past, but with their comeback in this area, I still marvel at their beauty.
