A "Love Your Mother" Friday Five

This week's Friday Five was inspired by the extreme weather events happening...well, just about everywhere around the globe.

1. Have you experienced living through an extreme weather event- what was it and how did you cope?

When I was about junior-high-school age our area experienced a three-day blizzard/ice storm that knocked out our power. I remember my parents burying food from the freezer in the snow outside...eating by candlelight...shivering in the cold, despite our back-up wood stove, and cooking on same...snow banks that soared above the roads, once the county plows were finally able to get out. At the time it was more exciting than frightening, although now as a Responsible Adult I'd be in an uproar over impassible roads and frozen pipes and spoiling food and dying tropical foliage in my home.

I've also been in the immediate area of a tornado. This was when I was in school. One afternoon, in the wake of a strong thunderstorm, the sky grew eerily green and quiet, with woolly black clouds dangling ominously overhead, and suddenly an emergency siren sounded across campus. My dormmates and I were evacuated to the basement, where we had to sit along the hallways and "assume the position" -- knees up, head down -- until the all-clear was given. (A pizza delivery kid who'd been in the building at the time was also there with us, which provided a small bit of comic relief as we wondered what was going on outside.)


2. How important is it that we wake up to issues such as global warming?
I think it's very important; which isn't to say that people will actually do it, until it affects them personally in a dramatic way. And even then you will find people wanting to ideologize the science of it in ways that make me want to bite a chunk out of my desk.


3. The Christian message needs to include stewardship of the earths resources agree/ disagree?
I very much agree. But I think the discussion needs to become serious, and not devolve into the sort of superficial, ribbon-wearing "awareness" campaigns and minimal-commitment gestures that -- ahem -- some of us mainliners are inclined to fall into. Good stewardship is going to, in the end, hurt. It's going to make us uncomfortable, and inconvenience us, and keep us from owning all the toys we want. Are we truly willing to step up to that? And I'm asking myself this same question, as I look at my own piddling efforts to reduce my carbon footprint.


And because it is summer- on a brighter note....


4. What is your favourite season and why?

Oh, definitely autumn -- mild sweater-weather, temperatures, beautiful colors, those misty fall mornings...delightful. The best time for hikes and picnics, in my humble opinion.


5. Describe your perfect vacation weather....
See above. Or pre-summer -- like, the first couple weeks of June, when everything is still freshly green and it isn't stiflingly hot.