We’re all suffering Blackberry Winter here in the mountains. And I do mean suffering. Grandson, daughter and I have all contracted our ‘usual’ spring colds due to radical temperature and weather shifts, and it’s simply way too cold and nasty outside for me to finish tilling a tier of the garden for tomatoes and peppers. We haven’t seen the sun in days. It’s not quite cold enough for heat, not warm enough to get out of our winter sweatshirts and sweaters. Yuck!

I found out about Blackberry Winter the first spring we spent here, in 1993. That was the year of the Great Blizzard on March 13 that buried us under 3-4 feet of wet snow and cut the electricity off for two full weeks. It was also the year of our first forest fire on April 13, exactly a month later and pretty scary (I’m used to them by now). Then, right around May 13, the lovely seasonably warm weather turned suddenly dark, damp and relatively cold (low 60s during the day, 40s at night). It lasted for nearly two weeks, and I was hard pressed to figure out what’s wrong with May around here. I’d seen May be the hottest month of the year in several states we’d lived previously!

That’s when my new friend Margaret informed me rather dismissively that it’s just Blackberry Winter. Happens every year during the first half of May, she said, and in the 15 years since I’ve found that to be true and entirely predictable every single year. See, the blackberries bloom during that time, and the cold weather always coincides with the appearance of their white blooms. Not with the crocus and jonquils, not with the dogwoods and redbuds, not with the apples, pears or cherry blooms. Always with the blackberries. As soon as you see the buds starting to open you know for a fact the weather will turn within a day or two, and stay dismal for as long as it takes for them to be pollinated and drop off.

Thus it was with joy and gladness that I received the news in my head-stuffed, achy spring illness that our daughter and son-in-law will be visiting Granny, Grandpa and an Aunt Granny nearby next weekend with baby Sunshine! Of course that means I have to scramble to finish that darned quilt, but I can’t wait to hold that baby and kiss her soft cheeks! The weather should be great by then, the blackberries are almost done doing their thing. Our colds should be well over with by then too, and we’ll disinfect the house thoroughly for the occasion.

I’ll take lots of pictures! So stay tuned all you Moms and Grandmas out there, this Grandma is ready to show off big time!

At least 56 people died in violent spring storms across the eastern midsection of America on February 5th, the day of “Super Tuesday” voting in primaries across the country. Including Tennessee, which bore the brunt of the storms and lost the most people. Hundreds were injured. Oddly (or not), I had dreamed about tornadoes Monday night. The kind of dream where I’m standing on a rise in “big sky” country watching tornadoes off in the distance. I’m one of those people who seldom remembers dreams, but the ones I do remember tend to be weird premonitions.

My son had it too, informed us all one day when he was four that he’d dreamed something that sure enough happened just like he said it would just hours later. “I’m a psycho,” he told us quite seriously. “We know these things.” Though we of course laughed at his alliteration, this was coming from a guy who’d spent the first weeks of his life in the storm cellar – standard for April in Oklahoma. We weren’t too surprised.

Dream interpretors link tornadoes to big changes coming, though in this case it might just have been forewarning of the next day’s storms. They’re a little early this year, season doesn’t usually start until March, or get really hairy until April. But there are some big changes coming. My new granddaughter should be officially welcomed to the world by this time next month (though her Mom is really hoping for a Leap-Baby on February 29). A Democrat will win the Presidential election in November, finally ending the Cheney reign of terror. The transition from winter to spring is always turbulent, with its storms and wind. Birth can be tumultuous.

Since my state doesn’t get to vote in the primaries until May, of course it was the weather that caught my attention – there’s just something a little synchronicity-like about a tornado hitting Clinton, Arkansas while Democrats there were voting for a Clinton. The best overview of it all is on Jeff Masters’ Blog on Weather Underground. Only one other killer outbreak hit so early in the year – the January 3, 1949 storm in Warren, Arkansas that killed 60.

My husband’s most vivid childhood memory is of when a tornado ripped through his small eastern Oklahoma town when he was eight. His parents managed the downtown hotel, his grandma lived just a block behind. Told me that he went outside to pick up softball-sized hailstones to put in the freezer after the first wave of severe weather passed, thinking it was over. Then, over the hill on the south side of town, it came. Nearly a mile wide, and black as night.

Instead of talking about some “freight train” sound, he said it was deathly quiet until the world fell apart. His Dad hid under the kitchen table with his little brother, his Mom hid in a closet, and he hid under a bed on top of a hotel guest. Who, when the wind died down, was dead (along with 80 other people in the little town). The hotel was destroyed, only one wall still standing. He said the weirdest thing was that a pair of jeans was sticking right through it, the seat inside the lobby and the legs outside the building.

I think it’s terribly sad that so many died on Super Tuesday. I don’t know how many of them knew it was coming, might have been saved. Tennessee is just over the ridge to the west of us, but we somehow dodged the bullet on Tuesday that destroyed so much in our neighbor state. There is no warning system here, no sirens to go off right at dinnertime like in Oklahoma. And here in the mountains the sky’s not big – we’d never see it coming until it was here. Yet in order to hit the house it would have to be aiming for us – drop down straight on top of us – and one thing I learned growing up in Tornado Alley was that if it’s got your name on it, it’ll find you no matter where you hide. If it doesn’t, you can stand on the porch and calmly watch it go on by. That’s pretty fatalistic, I know, but it’s true nonetheless.

Still, people do love to talk about the weather. Every bit as much, they say, as people love to talk politics. So for all the big changes coming, this will be the historic year that the two topics of conversation became one for a day. I’m a psycho. We know these things!