Snowbound

I talked to my cousin in Atlanta. They are in the midst of a snowstorm, kind of a rare thing this far south. He said they were doing okay but they may be snowbound for several days.
This brought back a horrible memory of my school days. We had this teacher in the sixth grade who came from Minnesota. She had married a boy from Harper and they moved back to his home during the Great Depression. When anybody in her class misbehaved (and that was a category I seemed to lean toward) she would use a drastic punishment to help us mend our ways. We had to copy a very long poem titled Snowbound. It was written by a poet named John Greenleaf Whittier. The poem was 4617 words and it had to be written out in "acceptable" cursive. The teacher, Ms. Warrinton, was the judge of the acceptable part. I am amazed that I remember so little of the poem since I had to write it (and rewrite it when it was not deemed acceptable) many times during the year. My big problem was talking too much. Even back then I seemed to have a lot of stories to tell. That experience (copying this poem) may have been my first recognition with irony. First the poet's middle name, Greenleaf, always looked strange right under the title: Snowbound. And second the chance of us being snowbound in Harper seemed remote and pretty much unlikely. With the way things are going this year it does not sound impossible that we would be caught in such a predicament as being snowbound.

Tales of Harper, short stories and poems about the fictional town of Harper, Mississippi is available on Amazon Kindle

Coming soon: More Tales of Harper (an ebook on Amazon)