Glenna Stearman Park
Winter wind woke me from a deep warm sleep with its whistling around the outside of the house and the rush of leaves in the trees. It was Kansas all over again, especially those cold windy nights that sometimes drove snow drifts up the house walls to the roof and completely over the tops of cars. I remember the wind as a life-long background accompaniment that brought summer prairie fires in Oklahoma, dust storms in Kansas, and tumble weeds in Texas. But thunder, lightening, high winds and hail stones were nature’s hissy fits, tantrums that always made a born-again Christian out of me—at least until morning when the sun came out to apologize for scaring me. One time when I was older, I remember hail stones being thrown at me as I dashed to the car with an extra metal trash can lid for the driver. After hailstorms, we always had to do a window check in the whole house to see if we had to put up wood or heavy plastic barriers.
A few years into grade school, snowy weather blew in for Halloween, so we all wrapped in sweaters and scarves under our heavy coats and filled up our pillow cases with candy, cookies, gum, and apples on our annual raid through the neighborhoods. We left our tracks in the snow as we “trick or treated” for candy that lasted the rest of fall. I always wanted to be a princess, but settled for being a witch that year since no one could tell what my costume was under all the heavy coats anyway. Green eye shadow on my lips was a fun detail.
I shared a bedroom with my sister, Guyna, where we had two double beds, but when the wind sneaked in between the cracks around the windows, we slept in one. Heavy socks and flannel night gowns, 3 or 4 blankets and a big alpaca fur coat thawed us, but she and I had territorial space, which only freezing temperatures could compromise. We kept a clearly understood center line down that bed.
At East I envied the football players having a bonfire on the side line to keep their fingers thawed out. Pep Club girls hovered closer to one another while the frosty Friday night wind tried to blow up under our new short-skirted uniforms. We yelled, chanted and jumped to keep warm. At Homecoming, that same cold swirled around the Football Sweetheart Kay Brinnon and her attendants , all shivering on the backs of convertibles parading around the Wichita U. track. (Left, Glenna Stearman, Floyd Watson, Dallas Crump, Football Sweetheart Kay Brinnon and Dan Kinney, under Homecoming’s Cold, Cold Heart, tattered by the wind.)
In the frigid wind, Dianne Pope, Vesta Patterson, Kay Brinnon, Dallas Crump, Susie Smith
A few years later, after we graduated and I was a student at WU, the university closed the campus at 2:00 in the afternoon because a blizzard had quickly covered the cars in the parking lot. Many students could not even find their cars, let alone dig them out.
The winter winds finally subsided. The sound of lawn mowers always brought the first promise of spring. East High windows were flung open, with the scent of cut grass gently promoting thoughts of summer. The warm breeze made lying out in the sun tolerable. The soft buzz of insects and the melodic meadow lark teased the air when it was blistering hot, making us wish for cooler days. Yet that fickle air kept me working on a tan, drinking ice tea, and enjoying the scent of lilac and other flowers, sometimes a delicate reprieve from the sultry sun. Then rain made the asphalt steam on the streets and sidewalks. Ultimately, more aggressive storms rolled their grand pianos across the sky as we rushed to get inside. Pea-sized hail prompted us to take cover. Occasionally, tornado warnings made us watch the sky more carefully.
Now our compromised promise to protect and keep the land has resulted in hurricanes, cyclones, forest fires, volcanoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods and more. We can’t argue, or win, with Mother Nature.
