by Jean C. Fisher

Created on: December 09, 2010

FOUR OF THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSONS IN LIFE

For a while in the late 1960s, I lived in the state of North Carolina with my first husband. We lived in the teaming metropolis of Kings Mountain, North Carolina. I knew for certain that I was in a very different place from California (where I grew up) when the ice storm hit. (They call it “freezing rain” back there.) For those of you who have never witnessed it, freezing rain precipitates in liquid form and then freezes as soon as it touches the ground (or any other object that it encounters on the way down).

There is an extremely surreal quality to the landscape after an ice storm. . . Every tree, every branch, every twig and leaf and even the tiniest blade of grass, is coated with a thick, crystalline glaze of sparkling ice. It looks like someone poured clear, molten glass over everything in sight, after which it cooled and hardened. Light reflects from every surface and tiny detail transforming the scene into a sparkling, magical-looking, wintery fairyland.

There’s one big problem with freezing rain, though: While it's making a storybook picture out of your neighborhood, it's also coating all the streets, sidewalks, steps, walkways and power lines with thick slabs of heavy, slippery ice. The electricity and telephone lines become so heavily laden with ice that power poles snap and fall down like popsicle sticks - after which the phone service and electrical power are nonexistent for quite some time.

Oh, and there's one other bad thing about freezing rain. It’s freezing cold. Cold like you’ve never FELT cold. The kind of cold that cuts right into your bones no matter HOW many layers of clothing you have on.

When I lived in Kings Mountain, my (long-ago ex) husband worked at the local mica mine during the day while I stayed home in the tiny single-wide trailer that we shared in a little mobile home park way up in the mountains in the middle of NOWHERE.

One day, when my husband was off at work, an ice storm hit. Predictably, the ice brought the power lines down right away and, because we relied solely upon electricity for heating and cooking in our little trailer, within an hour or so, the temperature inside dropped like Evil Knievel over the Snake River.

I had, at the time, only one good, heavy coat, a faux fur, and as the temperature inside the trailer plunged, I was forced to put it on (along with just about every OTHER piece of clothing I owned) in an vain attempt to keep warm.

The only

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