Felt like winter tonight, the hallucination helped considerably by a cold wind off the gorge. But I never felt a cold winter wind like the one that whipped off Chesapeake Bay when I lived on Maryland's Eastern Shore, on what is called the Delmarva Peninsula (because parts of it are in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia), a flat narrow sandbar between the bay to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east.
Once I walked out the dirt road from the farmhouse we rented to the mailbox, a quarter mile journey through a horizontal snow storm. I had a full beard at the time that reached my chest. When I returned with the mail, my wife ("Sally") took one look at me and screamed. Apparently along the way I had brushed some snow off my face -- but since the hairs on my beard had frozen, they snapped like icicles and I took the beard off half my face with the gesture! So much for my long beard.
What I consider my best talking blues from my folksinging days was written about my experiences on the Eastern Shore. I call it the West Meets East Talkin' Misery Blues. It ends this way:
But now I’ve seen everything there is
That Eastern Shore ended the list
That leaves only the grave to autograph
You can make this here my epitaph
It takes a cat to go to a garden … takes a dog to go to a tree … takes a seagull, flying o’er the Eastern Shore, to go to the likes of me
It doesn't get that cold here but it gets cold enough for me. It's not too bad when the wind isn't blowing, which it isn't most of the time. But tonight is a cold one for the little people out with their bags.
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