These windy fall days blow us away

This past Wednesday was a very windy day in and around Pea Ridge. Although so far our fall season has been mild, Wednesday's blustery wind was a reminder that after a while the fall season gets serious, with temperatures dropping on down there and so on. Still, the fall is my favorite season, and I try my best to hold onto it and to ward off the winter as long as possible. I'm a little like the big sailor Nate in the comic strip Overboard, in that I want to keep the leaves stuck to the trees, keeping them green, and blocking the entry of November for so long as possible. Of course, November comes anyway, as you would expect, and the leaves fall as they do every year.

The strong winds usually have a way of creating work for us, or making the work we do more complicated. On Wednesday, we had tree limbs and sticks down all over the Pea Ridge Cemetery, and stray flowers strewn all across the landscape. Often it is when the wind combines with rain that things get blown around helter skelter, but Wednesday's wind did quite a job all by itself. When Nancy and I first moved back to Pea Ridge in 2002, we bought the house at 167 Patton St. One of the attractions of our house site was the lawn with its dozen or so of beautiful trees. We soon were reminded that trees, plus wind, equals work for the homeowner. I think it was in 2004 that we had a straight-line wind storm which really tore up our trees, especially those south of the house, and in order to clear the broken limbs and uprooted trees I had to haul five truckloads of limbs and sticks to the city's chipper.

When wind comes along and there are leaves on the ground, it has a way of blowing them into my garage whenever I open the door to get the car in or out. On Wednesday afternoon, I swept out the garage, bagging up the leaves that had blown in. Then I looked around, and the wind had just delivered a new batch. I swept them up, and before I could finish, more leaves arrived. After my fourth try, I shut down the garage door and went off the do something else.

One thing I notice, now that Wednesday's winds are gone, is that most of the leaves that had collected on our lawn are gone. Also, my neighbor's pile of beautiful red leaves are also gone from under his tree. I guess all our leaves were blown northwards onto someone else's place over yonder. When we lived on Patton Street, we used to get everyone's leaves from our south and west, even though many of our own leaves blew away onto someone else farther north. I notice that some spots have a way of collecting leaves from everywhere, because of the way the wind swirls and turns. When we lived in Jonesboro in the early 1990s, our house there used to collect leaves up to six feet deep at the south end. The winds seemed to target that spot, and to drop everybody's leaves on us there. I spent lots of time crunching and carrying away leaves.

Many of us have a certain affection for even the wintertime. I can almost love the winter, except for the winds, and except for getting the vehicles around without denting fenders or crunching something. On the farm when I was growing up, taking care of the cows and so on, I never really minded the cold so much; I could always add another layer of clothing; but the winds had a way of making the cold twice as cold as it really was. Back in 1962, when I was a student at Hendrix College in Conway, and living in Oppelo, Ark., south of Morrilton, I was riding a motorcycle to school every day. I didn't really have the right clothes for doing that, but I had a big wool coat which worked pretty well early in the season. But when the temperatures became seriously cool, my big open coat sleeves caught the wind and channeled it all up around my shoulders. It was like I had no coat at all! I soon exchanged my big wool coat for a suede leather jacket with sleeves tight at the wrists. That old suede jacket was just the thing in the wind. I never had another coat that did so well at keeping me warm in the cold wind. I wore that old suede jacket for years, until it just kind of fell apart, and my wife told me I didn't look like Elvis in it anymore!

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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Editorial on 11/18/2015