Mammaw Jones, once more...

My Mammaw Jones used to say, "you have to be bigger than the weather...."

How true. How true.

Over my 30+ years in Connecticut, I have come to wonder if CT is in New England at all. I think of New England folks as saying 'posh' to the weather and soldiering on no matter what. Maybe in VT and NH and Maine, but not here in southern New England. We're, for the most part, real wooses about weather. People in CT seem to react like people in Atlanta to snow and rain and high winds. Troubling in the least....

People have been calling the Cluster and sending me emails about whether to cancel church on Sunday. It's 'Thursday', for goodness sake, Sunday is like a decade away in the way life passes for me. And I happen to trust people enough to believe they will wake up Sunday morning and look out the window and say, "it looks fine" or "it's not a fit day out for man nor beast" and decide whether 'church' is on the agenda as hurricane Irene bears down on us.

When I lived in Charleston, WV back in the late 70's, Governor Jay Rockefeller, now a Senator from the Mountain State, declared an emergency regarding the snow storm of the century bearing down on all us Mountaineers. People emptied stores of water, batteries, canned goods and made a run on liquor stores like hadn't happened since the end of prohibition. Chaos reined. Life as we knew it ended. Every event in the state was canceled in anticipation of the storm that would end the world, perhaps.

Some low pressure system caused the storm to hope over WV and blast Pennsylvania, Maryland and Northern Virginia instead.

We all had water and batteries and canned goods for the next few years.

I told Bea, the Cluster's Administrator, today how when I was 17 years old, I'd put the chains on my father's big old Ford LTD and go across a mountain that was 5 miles up and 6 miles down to see a movie in Bluefield, 29 miles away, in the middle of a snow storm. Mountain people give a fig about the weather. Life goes on. We're simply bigger than what nature throws at us.

People in CT don't go to church when it's raining hard. Give me a break....

Weather happens every day. Every day there is weather. And we are expected to be bigger than the weather. So, on a perfectly wondrous June day when the temperature is 70, the sun is shining and the wind is out of the southwest, we need to be 'bigger than that weather."

No different that hurricane, flood, earthquake and blizzard and the apocalypse.

We all need to have common sense, know our limitations and 'be bigger than the weather' for goodness sake....