Sometimes in the fall, the voices in my head get so loud and frantic I am surprised the people near me can’t hear them.
“Hurry,” they say. “Hurry. Get a move on. Time is wasting.”
You see, long before Jon Snow heard the prophecy, I knew winter was coming.
It began back when the Boy was an infant. We lived on a ranch, on dirt roads that turned to gumbo in September when the rains came. Mud so thick and heavy the trucks hauling calves to the fall market had to be towed out by tractors. This was destroyer level mud. And we ran out of disposable diapers.
The girls and I were beside ourselves. Just as we were getting ready to sacrifice a bath towel, our mail carrier beeped his Jeep horn. Now this was no ordinary mail carrier, but a slightly psychotic retired rancher and military veteran. He didn’t even slow down for the mud up past his hubs. He made the mailman on Christmas Vacation look like an amateur. And that day, in the Jeep, was a package of items I had left at my mother’s at my last visit with the baby. That included enough disposable diapers to get us through until the roads dried enough for ordinary vehicles to get to town.
When I got there I purchased two dozen cloth diapers. That began the transformation of a relatively young mom into a ready-for-anything expert.
Our storage began to look like a Costco had exploded. Need a jar of chili sauce? We had 12. Beans, dried milk, diapers, wipes, TP, you name it, we had it. And there were plenty of times, living miles away from pavement, let alone town, we relied on those back stocks to get through.
As the Stranger and I became empty nesters, we pared the inventory down to what we might need in the next week or 10 days, then even more until we don’t buy coffee until we’re out. Shocking, I know.
Yet every year, down in the late summer, I have the overwhelming urge to rush around like a squirrel after nuts, to stock up and store away for the long, dreary, notso- cold winter that we know is coming.
Maybe I will heed the voices just a little this year. Stock a few essentials. Coffee, ibuprofen, chocolate. After all, one can’t be too prepared.