I sat at my desk early this morning and watched what feels like the beginning of winter outside. It’s been cold for the last few days, but it hasn’t been awful, just a few degrees below freezing, which means you don’t need to button up your jacket as you walk across the grocery store parking lot to the door. (At least, here in Minnesota, we don’t.)
Still, below freezing is more like mid-December than mid-November here, so it feels a bit early. And this morning, we have snow falling lightly but steadily. According to the weather guys at St. Cloud State University, we’ll get between one to three inches, and it’s likely to stay for a while.
As I looked out the window and watched the snow, I realized that this will be my seventieth winter. That round number – seventy – is kind of scary. So, I thought about winters past for a moment, and then turned to my computer and started iTunes to keep me company as I looked at the morning’s news.
And a couple of songs in, I was pulled from winter to summer by Michael Martin Murphey’s “Wildfire.” And not just any summer. The summer of 1975 was one of the best summers of my life. I was finishing up some required coursework at St. Cloud State as I eyed graduation in early 1976. I had an on-campus job that I liked with co-workers I liked as well. I went out with a number of very nice young women (though nothing serious came of those dates).
And I was reminded of a coffee date in a long-gone Country Kitchen during that summer of 1975. I sat across the booth from one of those young women, and we talked, no doubt, of inconsequential things as the records came and went on the jukebox.
One of those records was “Wildfire,” and no matter how many winters I may see, the very first strains of that single will always take me back to a pleasant summer evening with fine company nearly fifty years gone.
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whiteray
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