No Humidity and No Bugs
It’s been hot here for two weeks. What was green is now quickly browning. Since my husband believes that watering grass in a desert is 1) wasteful of resources, 2) silly, and 3) “giving aid and comfort to the enemy” (I say that’s what Jesus wants us to do), lawn mowing season was as brief as the three-week spring.
Since this is where I came in a year ago, I know a little about Wyoming summers. The sun is intense, but there is almost no humidity, so the heat isn’t too bad. It cools off late in the afternoon. And there are—relative to Kentucky anyway—very few bugs. The thunderstorms are spectacular in this thin air—lots of lightning and brief, hard rain. Tomorrow night, we’ll carry our folding chairs to a nearby park for the weekly municipal band concert. Last week, we missed the opening of the concert series because we were visiting friends who live on a ranch on the Oregon Trail and listening to live bluegrass.
For some reason the meeting of the General Assembly has been on my mind. I’ve followed the issues a little more closely than I have in years, possibly because for the first time since 1992, I am far away from the “ground zero” of Louisville and the headlines that appeared regularly before, during, and after the Assembly meeting. I’m waiting to see if the Saturday religion page in the Casper Star Tribune will feature any news from Birmingham. Among the notices about church activities, there is usually each Saturday one religion feature. Last Saturday it was about the Episcopalians and not about Episcopalians and gay priests and bishops. There was a article in the July/August issue of the Atlantic Monthly that claimed that the Republican agenda of “gays, guns, and God” that plays well in the South does not play well here in what the article called the mountain inter-west. That has been my experience here in Wyoming, brief as it has been. It’s live and let live.
Far away as I am from the heat and humidity of the Birmingham summer and the intensity of all those Presbyterians at work discerning Christ’s will, I feel a bit ambivalent about the region and the church of my birth. I think it’s in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom that Quentin Compson, away from Mississippi at Harvard says, “I don’t hate the South. I don’t.” I understand what he means now.
Lynn
Since this is where I came in a year ago, I know a little about Wyoming summers. The sun is intense, but there is almost no humidity, so the heat isn’t too bad. It cools off late in the afternoon. And there are—relative to Kentucky anyway—very few bugs. The thunderstorms are spectacular in this thin air—lots of lightning and brief, hard rain. Tomorrow night, we’ll carry our folding chairs to a nearby park for the weekly municipal band concert. Last week, we missed the opening of the concert series because we were visiting friends who live on a ranch on the Oregon Trail and listening to live bluegrass.
For some reason the meeting of the General Assembly has been on my mind. I’ve followed the issues a little more closely than I have in years, possibly because for the first time since 1992, I am far away from the “ground zero” of Louisville and the headlines that appeared regularly before, during, and after the Assembly meeting. I’m waiting to see if the Saturday religion page in the Casper Star Tribune will feature any news from Birmingham. Among the notices about church activities, there is usually each Saturday one religion feature. Last Saturday it was about the Episcopalians and not about Episcopalians and gay priests and bishops. There was a article in the July/August issue of the Atlantic Monthly that claimed that the Republican agenda of “gays, guns, and God” that plays well in the South does not play well here in what the article called the mountain inter-west. That has been my experience here in Wyoming, brief as it has been. It’s live and let live.
Far away as I am from the heat and humidity of the Birmingham summer and the intensity of all those Presbyterians at work discerning Christ’s will, I feel a bit ambivalent about the region and the church of my birth. I think it’s in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom that Quentin Compson, away from Mississippi at Harvard says, “I don’t hate the South. I don’t.” I understand what he means now.
Lynn
posted by Rick at 4:25 PM
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