Good friends are moving to Texas this week (whether we want them to or not).
There was a get together. Bring desserts. Come.
And so, over brownies and cake and strawberries and the like, a bunch of us got on the subject of comparing climates we’d lived in. I told them how one guy in our ward in New Hampshire back in the day had been a home teacher to a young family, and he knew the dad was in Singapore on business; meantime, Leeane, the mom, had three kids four and under and a 20- to 25-foot wall of compacted iced white across her driveway after the snowplows had come around her cul-de-sac.
You do not want your baby outside in zero degrees and you do not want to leave the kids unattended while you spend hours dealing with that. She was stuck.
Mike got his teenage boys up very early and shoveled themselves out so they could go start shoveling her out at about 6 am so she could get out and have some face time at church with adults. Freedom. (Mike O’Connell and sons from Merrimack, wherever you are now, the thank-you’s are still floating around 25+ years later.)
Another fellow chimed in with his own weather story, Michigan vs Minnesota.
Wayne talked about how he was going to miss being able to bike where it’s just perfect: just cool enough, just right, year round, he’d been doing sometimes 150 miles a week before his recent knee surgery. A hundred degrees for sixty days straight last year in Dallas? That makes it a lot tougher, he said, I dunno…
You don’t have to shovel heat, I offered, trying to help.
He laughed. True, that.