The Throat of Winter

It snowed last night in Georgia!  

It happens almost every year, yet every time the good people of the Peach State act as if it's some sort of miracle - schools close, businesses shut down, and everybody hunkers down in their various homes, refuges, and safe places and waits it out, both trembling in fear and rejoicing in delight at the spectacle of snowfall.  This happening two days after the M.L. King holiday that many of us didn't get off, there's a joke in there somewhere about this being the white-out version of the day, but that joke's probably racist and not funny anyway, so I won't make it (plus I can't quite come up with it).

Chilly scenes of winter: It's currently 19 degrees outside, and the forecast high for the day is only 27. The roads and my driveway are just a frozen sheet of white, and it may be days before it melts and the streets are drivable again.

One of these days (not today!), I've really got to cut that ivy down off the barn!

Chilly Scenes of Winter, of course, is a 1976 novel by Ann Beattie, but since it snows so rarely down here I don't have any frames of reference other than the past rare snow days in Atlanta and some literary, if dated, allusions.  Speaking of the latter, every time I'm snowed in on one of these rare winter days here in Georgia, somewhere in my mind I'm hearing this song from 1969 which both evokes the chill of winter while simultaneously reminding me of warmer, misspent days of my youth, smoking marijuana and making out in a boathouse on Lake Mohawk.

Since on first listen the lyrics are so hard to comprehend (I didn't even think they were in English when first I heard this album), here they are:

O the throat of winter is upon us.

The barren barley fields refuse to sway

Before the husky hag of early winter in her

Hoods of snowy grey.

Lo the frozen blue birds in the belfries.

The bluebells in their hearts are surely prey

Unto the grasping bat's wing of the winter pincer

Hoods of snowy grey.

Winter, winter, winter,

Are you but a servant of the bad one?