It's time for the annual rite of Spring Cleaning. No, I don't mean giving, Spring Thomas, Prater's Creek High's head cheerleader, a bubble bath. Hmmmmm, hold on a sec............harrrumph! What was I talking about? Oh yeah.

It's time to clean all of the windows in the house to let in that beautiful spring sunshine. Time to move all of the furniture outside to let it air out, and get the smell of smoke, from the fireplace, out of it

Even though it has been an unusually mild winter [thank you Al Gore(!)(?)], we did have our first snowstorm here in Prater's Creek in over two years.

Not to sound too Andy Roony-ish here, but, is there anything more peaceful than a Sunday afternoon snow? The family is at home, nobody stranded at work or school. I'll never forget Super Bowl Sunday my senior year in high school. My family, and the rest of the congregation, came out of church to see huge snowflakes coming down. The snowfall got heavier as we drove home, and as we ate my mom's roast beef dinner (let me explain to our yankee readers, and those of you in other countries, dinner is the second meal of the day, not "lunch" which is served at the same time, around noon, in schools and Brooklyn diners).

After we polished off dessert, my dad and I watched an ACC basketball game between NC State and somebody. The game ended with a Wolfpack player at the foul line to shoot two free throws with his team down and no time left in the game. A situation I had enacted a thousand times out in the driveway shooting free throws, but I'd never seen it happen in a real game. And the dude made both. What a game! And outside the snow got heavier. And the Super Bowl was on next. I told my dad this may be the greatest day ever. And the snow kept coming down. We were out of school for a week. While I'm here talking about that snow, I also remember looking out my bedroom window one day that week, at the eight inches of snow still on the ground. The sun was shining, I had the radio on, and heard "Year of the Cat" by Al Stewart for the first time. Every time I hear that song, I'm back in my old bedroom, looking out the window at our snow covered neighborhood.

But, the Sunday snowfall three weeks ago was not so enjoyable. I was here at the Gazette office working on this issue. It had been raining buckets for two days. Late in the afternoon I looked out the window to see that the heavy rain had turned to heavy snow. "Ground's too wet to stick" I thought to myself and went back to work. Two hours later, I looked out of the window again to see that it was still snowing and it was sticking. That it was deep. And that I was stranded here in the office, and hungry, because I hadn't eaten all day, and had gone through a jug of Grandpa's finest. Hey, that's the way William Faulkner wrote.

I called for a pizza from the Prater's Creek Pizzeria, and they told me it would be an hour and a half wait. And they're only a half mile away! As I sat waiting on the pizza, and uncorked another jug, I heard a gunshot and the lights went out. The gunshot turned out to be a giant limb out front that had cracked and fallen across the power line. Well, I lit a couple of candles and turned up that ol' jug. Then a big boom happens, with a a fiery flash out in the yard and it looked like the Fourth of July out there in that snow. I went running outside in a panic thinking it was a gas line or transformer. The next day I found plastic shards out in the snow where the explosion had happened, and realized it had been a homemade bomb. Dang college kid neighbors. The sure got one over on Irving O. Tarbox let me tell you!

Letters To The Editor

Dear Gazette,

Your paper boy keeps throwing my dang paper up on the roof of my trailer. And the days he don't do that, he manages to throw it in a big pile of dog mess in my front yard. If this keeps up, I might just have to cancel my prescripshun!

And after that pitiful last issue,  well, just let me say it wouldn't worth climbing up on the roof of my trailer to fetch it!

Fred Davenport

Prater's Creek, USA

God's Country