From my Dad:
This evening, the wind blows in across the Neuse River and lights on the front windows of our home. It is unlike the southerlies that come in summer or the harsh wind from the north that chills us in winter. It is more of a welcoming to spring or the coming summer that we have waited for seemingly forever. Warmth! It promises warmth! As soon as it has passed, our lives will turn to the south in anticipation of the life enhancing rays of warmth.

If we could look forward to anything with greater eagerness, what might it be? Perhaps the shining faces of our grandchildren’s next visit? Maybe the pleasure of a fine golf course with mature grass and manicured greens? Hauntingly, the soft touch of our lover’s hand at bedtime? Such thoughts are these!

What do we want? What do we need? We have all that we could wish for in a lifetime. Sometimes, we think of what might come after we pass from this earth because we find it difficult to imagine that anything could be finer than what we have had here. Could it be? And will we know it?

So many questions. So few answers! But how happy we are that we can experience what is here and now. All of life is not so cheerful, but when we contemplate all that we have done, we feel that we have had the best of it all. If there is more beyond this, then we hope that we will have prepared ourselves for the better part of it.

But for now, we will wait for the southerlies.

Have you heard the story of Donald Herbert, the New York firefighter who very suddenly — after almost ten years without speaking — sat up and said, “I want to talk to my wife”?

Donald had been very seriously injured in December, 1995, when the roof of a burning building collapsed and pinned him underneath. Experts estimated he was without oxygen for six minutes. Over the past ten years, Donald has been almost completely blind and struggling with rehabilitation. His memory was nearly completely gone; he was unable to recognize family and friends, and he had very little ability to communicate. In fact, simple monosyllable responses were all he could muster, and those were exceedingly infrequent. Until Saturday.

On Saturday, Donald suddenly came to life. He sat up and told a member of the nursing staff that he wanted to talk to his wife. When they called his house for him, his 13-year-old son answered the phone. “Impossible,” thought Donald, “he’s not old enough to talk.” Donald spent the next 14 hours talking almost incessantly and was up most of the night visiting with his family and friends with whom he had been suddenly reacquainted. Some of them he recognized by their voices, even though he hadn’t remembered hearing them for a decade.

Doctors are a little baffled. Though these cases are extremely rare, they do happen, often without any known impetus. People do sometimes emerge from the most remarkable situations and, in some cases like Donald, show little signs that anything was ever wrong.

Welcome back, Donald. I’m thrilled for you and your family. May God continue to bless and keep you.

We’ve been playing “the guessing game” quite a lot around the house recently. Since I first introduced this little gem to Lily, she can’t seem to get enough. Here’s how it works: Someone thinks of something and offers clues to the rest of us. “I’m thinking of something purple” or “I’m thinking of a food that is yellow” or “I’m thinking of something white and cold inside.”

If Lily is offering the clues, they generally run along the lines of “this girl with long blond hair pricked her finger on a spinning wheel”, or “this girl went into the woods and found a cabin”, or “this girl has red hair and swims in the ocean.” Essentially, all of her clues are about girls from stories, most often a princess of some sort.

For Jack, though, things are different.

“It flies” is the only clue that Jack provides. From this clue, the answers are usually Buzz Lightyear, a kite, a duck, or an archaepteryx, which everyone knows is a flying dinosaur. When you guess right he says, “That’s right! It is an archaepteryx! Good job, Lily!”

I received an e-mail this morning with pictures of a sandstorm in Al Asad, Irag, on April 26, 2005. If you haven’t seen these yet, be sure you do… they’re truly amazing.

A Marine Corps News article said:

A dust storm similar to special effects on the big screen bellowed across the western desert of Iraq on April 26. The storm was spawned near the border of Syria and Jordan. Forward Operating Base Korean Village experienced tornadoes around 2 p.m. The storm moved in a northeasterly direction until it reached Al Asad, around 6:45.

As the storm moved closer the sky changed to a shade of orange until total darkness blanketed the ground. The storm passed over in about 45 minutes, leaving a heavy sheet of dust in its wake. Forecaster say the wall of dust may have reached 4,000 to 5,000 feet.

This dust storm was a spectacular sight and may look worse than it actually was. No one was injured and no equipment was damaged here.

[See additional photos of this sandstorm]