Blackberry winter

(Read time: 2 minutes)

Just before sunrise on Easter Sunday the temperature here in sunny South Carolina was 27 degrees.

Nights here in the Appalachian foothills have been cold all week, easing up to 41 degrees this morning.

My friend Clara, who lives in Florida but grew up in Ohio, calls this a “blackberry winter,” a term which took my breath away with its imagery of deepest purple berries blanketed with white snow.

Such late freezes are an annual occurrence, but always seem to come as a surprise. I measure them by the azalea blooms flanking my wooden mailbox post.

Around mid-March this area is adorned with azalea, dogwood and apple blossums and awash with yellow pine tree pollen.

Then, just when we are feeling the lulling effects of a Southern spring, a frost snaps us to attention.

Yet, every year, such weather is news. My Canadian friend David in Toronto emailed early Easter morning, “Has the weather been chilly? It was at the Masters in Atlanta.”

Since George Washington noted in his diary that snow fell on Mount Vernon in May 1774, there have been numerous recorded late-spring snowfalls.

On a beautiful May day in 1992 my Mississippi visitors and I stood in George Vanderbilt’s bedroom at Biltmore Estate in Asheville, N.C., and viewed Mount Pisgah from his balcony. Over the next three days, Vanderbilt’s mountain got 60 inches of snow!

Long ago I memorized, “What is so rare as a day in June, then, if ever, come perfect days …”

My mother, born in Mississippi 100 years ago this month, always said she once saw snow fall in June, and now I have the Internet to confirm her childhood memory.

Waking early Sunday morning, I watched Rogers and Hammerstein’s “Flower Drum Song” (Turner Classic Movies) with its lyrics, “A hundred million miracles are happening every day.”

For a girl who grew up in Mississippi that’s what snowflakes are: a hundred million miracles.

During the record winter of ’81-’82, I lived under six months of snow in Plattville, Wisconsin, and I loved every minute! I loved the whiteouts, driving through white-walled halls of highway, the blizzards and the 24 inches of ice on the Mississippi River at Dubuque.

After the mildest of winters here in South Carolina, I welcome walking into the warmth of home and snuggling under the covers while my coffee perks.

Poets always say it better. I quote Robert Louis Stevenson’s closing words in “The House Beautiful” from “Underwoods:”

“To make this Earth, our hermitage,
A cheerful and a changeful page,
God’s bright and intricate device
Of days and seasons doth suffice.”