Seeking JOY as this year’s goal is beginning to sound like Little Mary Sunshine’s wish list.
Before last month’s column arrived in subscriber’s mail boxes, a long area-wide whiteout was in the making. At my house, all I heard was the sound of silence as sleet pelted the roof and covered the landscape.
After a weekend of really bitter weather, I was encased from every direction. This was total ICE-OLATION! Approximately 10 days’ worth as February turned the calendar. Thankfully the Texas grid held and there was food in the house, so I was blessed – and stuck.
Trying to back out over four inches of ice with an upward slant kept me prisoner. That fear of sliding back and knocking out a garage door column was serious. It was plain that I needed a man with a truck to do the heavy lifting.
NextDoor was full of reports on local conditions, not much help to me. I couldn’t even see what my FM road looked like. Television was full of bad news.
I resorted to watching the air show at the bird feeder and the four-footed critters lining up underneath to stay alive.
A visiting family of crows on the back porch surprised me one morning as they rooted around cleaning up after the others had eaten.
There is joy in keeping the wildlife alive, even if it’s a cup full of black oil sunflower seeds at a time. Everyone was hungry.
Seeing the empty feeder forced me to bundle up and attack the huge sack in the garage and refill the smaller containers I brought inside.
My closest neighbor tried to help but even their four wheel drive “Bob” couldn’t leave a tire track on the driveway ice.
The sound of joy arrived when a local resource answered my call of distress and arrived with a Ditch Witch to scrape my driveway and release my car from the garage. I was freed on the 9th day of incarceration!
And I was SO thankful for those who were able to be helpers and were more prepared than I was. When I finally made it to town and retrieved 20 pounds of mail from the post office, I had lots of reading material to sort and digest. While I was coping with the sound of silence at home, the PO box was full of national weather warnings, scarier political activity at home and abroad and pounds of political ads for or against candidates in the coming primary election.
Reading letters to the editors is helpful to get other points of view. Recently a major regional newspaper offered two interesting comparisons. The first writer wanted more conservative news stories instead of the “left-leaning” ones that seemed to cover national and international news.
Adjacent to this printed letter was one from a foreign reader who shared a memory of the famous Walter Cronkite decades ago. Seated beside him at a dinner, the writer recalled the beloved journalist defending a liberal tilt among correspondents.
“Walter” considered that “as justified” (I’m paraphrasing) because their frequent interactions covering the courts and judiciary had to evoke a “degree of humanity” that people without such exposure don’t have. Some may think that’s “liberal,” said Cronkite, defending it as humanitarian, which is vastly different.
Some ideas and opinions simply come down to a very civil “facts are facts.” What’s the argument? It is what it is.
Maybe differing viewpoints may help you weigh whom you want to represent your “values” when the winning candidates compete in the November mid-year election. Some choices are difficult. Voters are urged to read between the lines, realizing how much AI generated stories and slanted PR is meant to manipulate voters.
Early voting started this week and ends next week, so whichever way you swing, be pleasant even if the weather turns dreadful before the March 3 election. Show up and vote whatever the weather is doing. Definitely thank your friends and neighbors who are sitting on those hard, cold chairs checking your vitals. They are pictures of democracy in action, volunteers who make the election polling places possible.
One bright spot of the in-home “ice-olation” came when doing paperwork concerning an accident, an insurance spokesman acted spontaneously by singing “Happy Birthday” to me as I was iced in on the big day.
Not only was that a rare feat, it restored my joy in that a total stranger could show his humanity during a very business-like conversation, being helpful at the same time.
Those are the things that bring smiles and joy. It touched one of the human senses – the auditory nerve – that reminds us we’re human.
Now, if just a few more men would wear their hearing aids, it could be a joyful place indeed!
If you haven’t voted early, get yourself to a designated polling place on March 3. The County Clerk’s office told me that a current driver’s license will be the necessary ID since official registration cards for 2026 had not yet been mailed.