Singing In The Rain – And The Snow?

Oh, what a blamed uncertain thing this pesky weather is; It blew and snew and then it thew, And now, by jing, it's friz! - Philander Johnson

It’s early Friday morning. There are three robins decked out in winter coats and ear muffs pecking furiously at the ground in one of the raised beds out in my garden. . It’s drizzly, cold and raw.

I’m hoping to get a call from a friend telling me he had gone to great lengths and considerable expense to concoct an elaborate April fool’s joke; that he outfitted the robins in their miniature winter attire and rented a snow machine from the nearby that he had done all this just to dupe me. But the phone isn’t ringing. This is the real deal. 

Ah! April in New England!

I should have known something was amiss. I should have suspected the worst when I saw Easton DPW Director Wayne Southworth standing outside asking for donations to supplement the

This April Fool’s Day storm shouldn’t be a big surprise to any of us. This has happened in the past. Southeastern Massachusetts was actually fortunate this time. We dodged the bullet; other areas of the state got

A few weeks back, I wrote a column entitled,, which consisted of three distinct rants; things that were bothering me; things that were driving me absolutely nuts. Okay, let me rephrase that; things that were driving me more nuts than I am already.

My rants were as follows….

Rant #1, Can You Do That In Public? exposed a young mom who was breast-feeding her baby at Starbuck’s in the Target store…. uh…. wait, I have that wrong. In reality, she was the one doing the exposing. I merely conveyed the story to my readers, one of whom was gracious enough to inform me that, “The Massachusetts Gen. Laws Ann. ch. 111 § 221 (2008) allows a mother to breastfeed her child in any public place or establishment or place which is open to and accepts or solicits the patronage of the general public and where the mother and her child may otherwise lawfully be present.”

That one still has me laughing. Can you imagine? I enraged a reader to the point that she took the time to look up the state laws on breastfeeding in order to prove her point. Her point being that, although I claimed to be, “….as open-minded as the next guy”; I was, in fact, a male chauvinist pig.

Sometimes we take life, and ourselves, way too seriously. We need to lighten up.

Rant #1 may have been the most fun I’ve had since I’ve been writing my columns for Patch.com. It’s a columnist’s job to elicit response; to stir the proverbial pot; to get his/her reader’s to react; to stimulate the emotions of the reader. Mission accomplished!

Rant #2, What Would Miss Manners Think? chronicled the antics of a group of courtesy-challenged teenagers my wife and I encountered at the on the corner of Route 138 and Plymouth Drive.

I only mentioned Rant #2 in order to segue to Rant #3, which is the crux of today’s histrionics. So here it is. Rant # 3, Snow Way! spoke of the storms that had pummeled our area with snow far beyond the norm during the past winter. I believe our total accumulation at that point sat at around seventy-eight inches or so. That’s a lot of the white stuff!

I penned those tirades on the first of February, a full two months ago. Why is it still snowing? I think it’s just God’s way of saying…..

Hey! You! Yeah you! Who did you think I was talking to - the voices  in your head? If you didn’t click on the link to ‘saying’ in the last paragraph, go back there and do it right now. How are you going to understand if you don’t click on the link? Come on, this is the internet. It’s interactive. Get with the program! I would have thought you’d know how this works by now.

Thanks! Now we can get on with it.

So, just a couple of weeks ago I was outside in shorts and a t-shirt, cleaning up the debris in my yard; a virtual treasure-trove of trash hurled from vehicles and passers-by on Route 106; a hefty collection of debris hidden beneath the snow and ice, now revealed.

I won’t even address the issue of why any decent human being would throw trash out the window of their car as they meander down the road to their final destination – hell! The word, moron comes to mind. A few other words come to mind, but I can’t use them here. Well, maybe I can because it’s the Internet, but I won’t. Use your imagination.

Among the discarded gems I scooped up and deposited in my trash bag were three empty beer bottles; a rusty hubcap; a menu from ; a bag from containing a half-eaten whopper and a soda cup; a broken hair brush; several empty cigarette packs and a few other items of interest, some that even I wouldn’t dare mention here.

But, without question, my greatest find from amongst the never-ending piles of rubble was a brochure extoling the virtues of recycling. Irony!

It’s now late afternoon and most of the snow has long since melted, nourishing the fertile earth below. I know you’ll find this difficult to believe, but I may have over-reacted to all this weather stuff. Can you believe it? Me! Mister cool, calm and collected.  

Margaret Atwood said, "In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt." I look forward to the stench.

Make it a great week!

 Bob Havey is an Easton-based freelance writer. His column, "The View From Here", appears each Tuesday at http://easton-ma.patch.com and his other column "Take Me Back" runs every Friday at http://mansfield-ma.patch.com.