Hasn't this month been twice as long as usual? We've been through so much.
Although we had nice rains at the beginning of the month, the heat now is relentless, making it uncomfortable to go outside for much of anything. I pity the thousands that have been without power for weeks on end.
In fact, wasn't July The Month From Hell?
**Record floods in more than one area of the country.
**Record drought in the West
**Record heat in the Midwest
**Record number of wild fires in the West
**Negative campaigning that never stops
**Middle East wars in several countries
**One of the worst mass killings in history
Oh, and did I mention low book sales? That sounds trivial, doesn't it, when put up against the context of so much human suffering?
My daddy blamed everything on "The Bomb." By that, he meant the atomic bomb that ended WWII. He believe that The Bomb realigned the earth, and especially changed the weather patterns. We lived on the South Plains of Texas, sometimes called the High Plains, the lower portion of the Panhandle, near Lubbock and not too many miles from the New Mexico state line.
As a young married woman living elsewhere, we would visit my parents on the South Plains, and I liked to sit outside on the steps of the front porch in the dark with my daddy. We talked about the government and the president, but mostly he was interested in the weather. He wasn't a farmer, but he was born and raised on a farm, so I suppose he still had that mind-set.
During those years of the fifties and early sixties, dust storms were bad. Remember--the Drought of the fifties still stands as the worst in the 20th Century and through July 2012. It was so dry the entire country was affected and the economy was just horrible.
Today, I'm not blaming the bad times on any one thing or any one person, or even God. I do know that much of the world is in turmoil, but truly...it's nothing very unusual at all. It's just that we know too much through the internet and the news, so instead of only hearing about the tornado over the crackly radio that hit the town thirty miles away, we hear about a hundred tornadoes all over the United States. Sounds much worse, doesn't it?
In third grade, Daddy left home on Monday morning and came home on Friday afternoon as he would continue to do for decades. But that particular stormy night, Mother had us three girls grouped around the radio, each of us with our crocheting or embroidering, as we listened to The Lone Ranger or some such program that was our nightly entertainment. Suddenly, an announcer interrupted the program with the announcement that a tornado had struck a nearby town where our aunt, uncle, and cousins lived. Mother had been crocheting, but when she heard that, such terror struck her heart she jumped up yelling, and somehow jammed the crochet needle through the skin between her thumb and index finger. Now, she really did scream, and set all three of us doing the same thing. I will never forget that night. Hysteria reigned for hours.
Was that the worst night of our lives? The worst week? The worst month? No, absolutely not. The storm was centralized over one small area, but we imagined the world coming to an end.
Okay, so now I feel better about this horrendous July we've just experienced. Yes, it was bad, but that night in 1948, we had no idea about the rest of the world. We only knew our little part of the universe had turned frightening.
Cheer up. We're still better off than most of the earth's population, and we're strong and resilient enough to weather whatever comes our way.
So, out with July and bring on August. We're ready.
Celia Yeary-Romance...and a little bit 'o Texas
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