That was then, this is now. and we still got Mud! by Bucky Lewis A chicken and an egg were lying in a bed together. The chicken was lying on its back smoking a cigarette with a very content smile on its face while the egg had its arms crossed and looked very angry and upset….. I guess we finally know the answer to THAT question! It's the same question that we ask about living here in the North Country. Is it easier living now than it was way back when? If you talk to any old-time native Yankee about the state of things in general, you will invariably almost always get the same response: "Life was much harder and simpler back when we was growin'up!" Then you would get stories about how "poor we were growin' up" or how "we used to walk 10 miles a day to go to and from school" The stories would be endless. In listening to these somewhat embellished accounts of the past it's a wonder that anyone survived at all! One thing that I do know is that, because of global warming, we used to have a lot more snow in the 'wintahs' than we do now. That is, until this last season. This last winter was truly an old fashioned one, with piles of snow that stirred memories of being a kid and building forts, having snowball fights, navigating hills on our Flexible Fliers and waking up hoping there would be no school. One thing that a great snow season does is create a great mud season. In that respect it was a lot tougher dealing with mud in the old days than it is now. Back when a mudslide was an occurrence and not a drink, there were no SUV's, no all wheel drive vehicles, and every car was rear wheel drive (remember muscle cars?). All these newer vehicles would have come in handier back then than they do now because there were a lot more dirt roads to negotiate. Now where we have an 80/20 mix of paved roads to dirt roads, back then it was just the opposite! It used to be that whole towns would close down for 3 weeks in March and April so as not to have to deal with the mud problem. There is even an old-time saying to that effect: "six weeks to bare feet". One thing a big mud season also does is bring with it a big insect season. Here is where we are worse off now than we were back in the old days. Already the emergency rooms in local hospitals are filling up with incidences of folks having to have ticks extricated. Years ago you didn't have to worry about being bit by a tick, all you would do was to just simply light a match blow it out and hold it on the head of the tick. Nowadays the tiny deer tick carries with it Lyme disease, of which about 17,000 folks die each year from. Not to be outdone by ticks and carrying it with it yet another worrisome disease, mosquitoes are making a headfirst charge to be the number one predator in the North Country. This year the mosquitoes are so big and nasty in some places that they have landing lights. And they are thicker than Ted Kennedy's tongue after a night of partying on the Vineyard. I am positive that the unofficial state bird of New Hampshire - the Black Fly - will find a way to come up with an exotic toxin that will shoot it up to the top of the list. So answering the question as to whether it was harder living then than it is now really is like answering the question of the chicken and the egg. One thing IS for sure, this year it's the same as it's been in the past. There are 5 seasons this year up here: winter, spring, summer, fall ------ and mud season.