It's cold here. No bullshit cold. Deathly cold. So cold that if a body don't find a way to stay warm it will shut down organ by organ in an attempt to survive. Who needs this? The coastal plains generally have moderate winters, but this cold snap is an exception. It's supposed to get down to single digit temperatures tonight after not getting above freezing today.
I was born and raised in the south and southeastern United States a few years before World War Two began. I didn't know that my family lived in poverty, because there were lots of people who seemed poorer than even we were. Rich or poor, insulation in houses didn't exist. It seems odd to say, but i don't think it had been invented. At least not like what insulation is today. Poor people built wood fires in fire places and cast iron stoves to stay warm by the time I was born, but the wealthier people were beginning to get coal furnaces and kerosene stoves in their uninsulated houses.
I have to reflect on what it was like for people when I was a kid sixty to seventy years ago. One life time and so much change. Change for the better technology wise. What really impresses me when it gets brutally here is the lousy weather reports they had when I was a kid. I've known it was gonna get this cold for a week, but when I was a kid we would have been lucky to know it was gonna get this cold for a day before it got here. What if you were ill or just feeling lazy and you hadn't chopped the wood or watered the cows or kept your preserved foods covered up? Then, BOOM, the temperature drops without warning and even your drinking water is frozen, and the babies still piss and shit in their diapers that are prone to be frozen on to their bodies.
It truly astounds me that tomorrow's weather and pretty much the whole coming week's weather can be reliably predicted using the current digital technology. The pre-emptive strategies of possible storms can be guessed with great accuracy. Humans can pretty much know when to run for their lives. They can know ahead of time when to stock up on supplies they might need. This just wasn't there for us even when I was a kid. It wasn't that long ago that homo sapiens lived really close to what their fellow species lived. Nature can still kill you in a New York minute, but now you might have thirty seconds or so to get out of it's way.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
