Be the Improvement in Our Community
It is Monday afternoon as I sit and write my column for this week’s edition of The Monticello News.
I am not sure what all of the snow and ice has done to the deadline for getting my column into the editor this week but I am going to do my part and make sure that I am punctual.
This afternoon my driveway is a sheet of solid ice over a few inches of snow.
Fortunately the electricity is still functioning and the furnace is working and it is warm inside my home.
However, I do shudder to think about what my bill for all this warmth will be when it arrives in a few weeks.
My wife made the requisite grocery run yesterday and there is plenty to eat for the next few days.
My daughter is certainly enjoying her time off from school though she spent a substantial part of the day sleeping. The most humorous thing that I have witnessed so far has been our dachshund’s trips outside.
The dog has been baffled by the white covering on the ground and having the body of a dachshund returns to the house with a rather cold belly.
All in all we have re-acted to the snow and ice in typical southern fashion and have hunkered down to await the thaw.
Snow and ice events are so rare that we southerners tend to remember them by the year.
I recall a snowstorm in 1973, when I was 11 years of age, which dumped about 14 inches of snow on my hometown of Macon. Macon was not prepared for 14 inches of snow and school was closed for a while. We went on Saturdays to make up for the lost time.
I also remember the blizzard that hit Georgia in 1993. Nannette and I were in Savannah and had to fight our way back to our home in Sparta in the thick of the blizzard. We made it but it was around three days before our power was restored.
No matter where one lives there are elements in the weather that are often disruptive.
Though we are battling snow and ice at the present, snow and ice are a way of life for our friends in the Northeast and the Midwest.
I wouldn’t want to live there but I recall my high school trigonometry teacher was native of Boston who wanted to return to Boston because she was afraid of the typical summer late afternoon thundershower that is a part of life in this corner of the world.
Many people consider Arizona paradise. I recall visiting Arizona in late September. The temperature hovered around 100 degrees each day. The line about it being “a dry heat” in the desert thus less uncomfortable is a load of beans. An oven is still an oven.
In fact, there are no places that have perfect weather. We have our heat and stifling humidity. The northern states have brutal cold and the west coast has rain and mudslides and I bet the weather isn’t even perfect in Hawaii.
The truth is that one can’t change the weather where they live. To borrow a phrase, “it is what it is.”
In fact, there are a lot of things we cannot change about the places we live. Yet, there are things that can be done to make our communities a better place to live.
This leads one to ask “What can we do to make where we live a better place?” All too often we lament what is wrong with our community.
The truth is that our community has problems, some that are unique to our community and other problems that we have in common with other communities. I need not list all of them
What each of must ask ourselves is simply what are we doing to make life better for all of us in our community.
There are many in our community who are doing things to make this a better place to live. They are to be commended for their efforts.
What about you? Are you a part of the solution? If not, then you are a part of the problem.