No snow, the playa lakes, basketball disappointments

With this week flying by, January is almost over and it looks to be another very fast year. I looked at the weather report this morning for our old habitat in the Northeast. Thought it is below freezing here with a fifteen mile per hour wind, it is dry – no snow. Not so for our friends in New Jersey. It gives me a very clear understanding of why my father moved us to Texas from Indiana so many years ago.


He had always told us that the primary reason was that he was tired of shoveling snow at all hours of the night when he was called in to the hospital. I can now relate somewhat. It is frustrating to get up at 3 a.m. and have to work a half hour or more to get out of the driveway onto roads that are not nearly clean enough to be driving on, knowing that Mama and the kids will have to deal with the rest of the mess when they get up. I love the snow, but it is better from a distance.

Mama was saying last night that she wonders what the spring and summer will be like here and I am curious also. Scattered across this area of Texas are pools of water called playa lakes. Playa is the Spanish word for beach and it is easy to see how they got their name. They are reservoirs of water made by catching rain and snow runoff into naturally occurring, shallow depressions in the landscape. Many of these lakes are completely dry now and I have had the opportunity to see them shrink as their content was licked up by the constant, dry winds of the Texas plains.

I am wondering what it will take to fill them. I have the beginning of a story I am planning on finishing this year about a thorough soaking of South Texas and two boys who get caught in the flood. It begins, “The old timers in the area are fond of saying that nothing ends a drought like a hurricane. This year they were proven right.” We’ll see.

Chase was a little demoralized last night when for the tenth or twelfth game of the season, he got zero minutes of play. I suppose it would have been less upsetting if the team had won by a narrow margin, but they won by 25 points and still his coach would not let him onto the court. In reality his chance of playing on a well organized basketball team was one of the major draws to this particular school. For what it is costing us, it has proved very disappointing in that area.

Chase is doing very well otherwise. He maintains a very high average in all of his subjects but it is difficult to overcome that disappointment; difficult enough that when I asked if he would mind transferring to the church school to save us some money, he was actually receptive to the idea. That troubles me. We will not hurry to make the decision, but it makes me wish I could somehow effect his coach’s decision to exclude him from play. To their credit, some of his teammates approached the coach again about the matter. I have not heard how that discussion turned out.

I got my review yesterday and it was good. He likes the job I am doing and I like doing the job. It is a win-win situation.