A Hillbilly’s Take On The Weather

by Stan Hitchcock

Being a genuine “born and bred, and born again” hillbilly from the Ozark Mountains I have always been attuned to the changes in the weather.  First, just cause I came from a family that was scared to death of them big ol’ storms that used to come out of Texas and Oklahoma and hit the Ozarks like a bat out of Hades and Mamma would push us kids down into the basement of our old farm house, make sure we stood in the Southwest corner where when the house blew away it wouldn’t crush us like a “betsy bug” and fall on top of us….an event that never actually happened in my Ozarks life, but still you never know….and, by the way, what the heck is a “betsy bug” anyway?  Mom had a lot of strange sayings like that, “It will smash you like a betsy bug”, “I’m gonna snatch you bald headed”, “Knock you into the middle of next week”, “Whoop you silly” and other terms of endearment that she never actually did but the very threat of it was enough to get my attention.  It did have a lasting effect on me however, for years I been looking for “betsy bugs” (thought I had found one once but it turned out to be a “black ground beetle”), and every time I see a bald headed man I think his Mother must have done it, time travel is getting “knocked into the middle of next week” and my silly behavior is a direct result of my getting “whopped” so often.   Part of my problem could probably be traced back to my high school Ag class.  Being a friendly sort, I kinda always talked a lot in class, much to the aggravation of Mr. Hood, the Ag Teacher at Pleasant Hope High.   It seems that I could always find a humerous angle in whatever Mr. Hood was trying to teach us boys and I just had to share it with my friends sitting around me.  This was in the years of 1950-1954 and the new rules about “whopping kids silly” had not been invented by the do-gooders yet.  Mr. Hood had lost his right hand in a farm machine accident (which made him an expert on farm safety) and they had replaced it with a wooden hand, covered by a leather glove.  Just when I would be getting into my clever joking about crop rotation, gestation periods for pigs, artificial insemination or the cure for bloody flux in calves…..right at the punch line….Mr Hood would come up behind me and “whoop” me on top of the head with that wooden hand and ring my chimes and completely mess up my joke delivery.  I would get quiet for a time, while the bells in my head quit ringing, and go on to do it again the next day of class.  Ever since then my joke telling timing has been off….I have the uncontrollable urge to rush to the punch line before somebody “whoops” me.   But, back to the weather…sometime in Mr. Gore’s growing up time in Washington DC (I know he was from Tennessee, but he lived in DC with his mother and Senator father), I mean way back in the formative years, some summer day he had to be standing outside in the yard of his DC Mansion thinking: what will I do when I grow up?  President? Naw.  Vice President? Uh yeah maybe….meanwhile,  the hot July sun was beating down on his little Gore head…when it came to him like a flash!  I can invent ‘GLOBAL WARMING” write books about it, give heavy paid speeches and be even richer than Daddy!  I can build a new mansion in Nashville and be world famous and stuff like that!  See kids, having a plan for your future is very important.  Meanwhile, back on the farm, us hillbillies are shivering in the new “Tennessee Glacier Development” region from the storms that continue to come up from Texas and Oklahoma and freeze our ever loving cabooses off, (by the way, I have noticed that trains have stopped using cabooses now a’ days so where does the crew ride?) and leaving those poor Oklahoma folks without heat and lights.  Yessir, I do hate ice storms, they ain’t pretty, they ain’t nice and if I had to vote for “Ice Age” or “Global Warming” right now give me a little warming, raise the water level of the beaches in California a couple of inches so the folks can move back a foot or two to lay their beach towels down, melt the ice in Oklahoma and Arkansas and let them good folks get back to living the good hillbilly life.  Amen brother Amen!

That is the Ozark Way.

Stan