The weather is warming up where I live, and that’s good news, I think. So far, this winter has been wet, dry, cold, warm and snowy – all in the same day, sometimes.

I ran across an old Department of Agriculture newsletter that described disaster relief programs available to farmers. I was attracted to the “Tree Assistance Program.”

The newsletter said, “Commercial producers of nursery and orchard trees to produce annual crops, and trees planted to produce timber, pulp or Christmas trees, who have suffered plant losses due to damaging weather including flood, drought, hail, freeze, excessive moisture or wind, may be eligible for cost share assistance to rehabilitate orchards or nurseries under the Tree Assistance Program.”

I hope that is still available for this growing season.  A lot of folks could mark “all of the above” in most years. I’m afraid we have reached the saturation point for agricultural disasters. The county where I live has been declared a disaster of some kind nearly every year. It’s getting kind of embarrassing.

That’s the biggest drawback to federal relief, as far as I’m concerned. The feds always want to help with “natural disasters” like floods and hail storms, but they won’t give you anything for unnatural disasters. Why can’t we get some relief for a bull in the milking parlor, or a goat in the station wagon? Nobody helps out with that kind of stuff.

I blame the television forecasters for the weather we’ve been having. I never saw any bad weather until the newscasters started making a big deal out of it.

Many of us can remember walking into the house and telling Mom, “Boy, it’s cold and icy outside! I fell down four times between the barn and the milk house.”

“It’s winter,” she’d say. “What do you think? We live in Hawaii or something?”

But the TV newscasters act like it’s never been cold before. They find four inches of snow in northern Minnesota and claim half the country has been shut down. People up there have more snow than that in their basements.

This winter I watched a TV station report a two-hour windstorm for an entire week. I saw a tree fall on one house eight times. From what I could tell, the wind kept shifting around and blowing this tree back upright; then, the next day, the wind would die down and the tree would come crashing down on the house again.

The following week a TV newscaster stood on a knoll as he reported the cold and wind. He threw a cardboard box in the air to show how windy it was – and staggered backward each time an arctic gust hit him in the face.

I wanted to shout, “Get back in the house! Didn’t your mother teach you anything?”

I held my tongue, though. I learned a long time ago that talking to your television is one of the first signs that the weather is getting you down.

Readers with questions or comments for Roger Pond may write to him in care of this publication.