It’s been blisteringly cold here in central NJ for several days. By “cold” I mean tear-your-face-off temperatures coupled with high winds. But the last two days have been sunny enough to allow us to open our car doors, which had been frozen shut. So off we went to the Stop & Shop. Still only 18 degrees out, though.
Patty can’t stop talking about the man she saw wearing flimsy cotton shorts. Our checkout clerk–who was wearing her coat over her clerk’s smock–said, “You should see some of the people we get in here, no matter what the weather. Some guy came in the other day in his pajamas.” That day it was not only horribly cold, but also raining.
(“Shorts! He was wearing shorts!” she mutters, for about the 50th time today…)
As a sage of my acquaintance once observed, “You don’t need to go to Wal-Mart to see People of Wal-Mart.” Looks like he was right.
It’s funny. While it’s hot here, it’s cold where you live.
Oh, the Southern Hemisphere does everything backwards!
When I shoveled snow back in Wisconsin, sometimes I would wear tennis shoes, even when we got a foot or more of snow. I guess I hung around Wal-Mart too much.
It’s warm here with a lot of rain, a great deal of rain. There has been some flooding where we live, but on some parts of our island, some folks’ homes have water chest-deep. Let us remember, at times there are always some who have some really big problems. Let us remember in prayer, those who have it much worse than we do.
I thought folks in Mindinao built their houses on stilts… but maybe I’m a couple of generations behind the times.
Sometimes you will see homes on stilts, but not many.
That picture with the man walking in the snow makes me think about winter back in Wisconsin.
Since I moved to the Philippines from a climate where freezing temperatures, gray landscapes, and months filled with snow in the winter are normal, many ask, do I miss the snow? Yes, I remember it fondly … shoveling snow off our driveway for hours, and then spending a few more hours removing the vast pile of snow at the end of the driveway, put there by the cities’ snowplow. And then after it was all gone, doing it again when it came by for another pass.
I remember one time in particular. During a major snowstorm, after working the second shift, barely making it home by midnight, after more than an hour’s drive, of what normally took twenty minutes. There, blocking my path, was a pile of chest-high, what had been just slush during the day, of now frozen solid, rock-hard ice, needing to be removed from the end of our driveway so I could park my car [the temperature had dropped greatly during the day, and now it was close to zero, with gale-force winds]. Just as I finished shoveling that pile at 2:30 AM, thoughts of Dean Martin singing Memories are Made of This began to linger in my mind, as did frostbite on my toes.
Did you really have to settle down practically on top of the Equator? I mean, I know that snow plows block driveways and snow sometimes freezes into immoveable blocks of ice… but other than that…?
It’s a long story, but there is an intelligent, brown-eyed, 98 lb, 4’10” tall, beautiful young woman with long black hair, who spoke three languages with a cute accent, had a wonderful smile, who lived far far away, across the deep blue sea, on a warm tropic island who, one day wrote me a letter, and put her picture in it, one who brought great meaning, joy, and love into my life, a virtuous woman who was still a virgin on her wedding night, whose laughter still echoes within my thoughts, one who passed on after just 17 years of marriage and 44 years of life, was deeply loved by many, is greatly missed by scores of other folks, and now waits for me, who I will see again someday, involved somewhere within.