Is having the first thing your 9-year old says to you, “Are you having trouble with your kidneys? ….No. Are you?”

Yes, we finally saw the movie Courageous last night.

I think our fake Spring has departed. Yesterday was very windy for here. For other parts of the country, you would have thought it was a rain-less hurricane. They predicted 55mph wind gusts but I’m sorry, it had to be stronger than that. I know I’ve lost a considerable amount of weight but I’m not that small, I’m not small enough a wind gust would knock me over.  I had to grab hold of my children or they would have floated away like Mary Poppins.

In the late 90s, we lived outside St. Louis. One morning I was preparing to walk with some friends and turned on the news to see what the weather was like temperature-wise. Of course St. Louis has a humidity that will half kill you. That morning I was shocked to hear this come from the weatherman’s mouth, “Hang on to your hats today, folks, it’s going to be a windy day. Wind gusts to 10 miles an hour!”

And he was serious.

Out here where I live on the prairies a wind gust of 10mph is barely a blip on our radar.

A number of years ago my sister and I were traveling to Denver in a bright yellow Volkswagon bug. Not that the color has any bearing on the story at all; it could have been green with purple polka dots, but it wasn’t, it was bright yellow and I just threw that out there for fun.

The wind was horrific and I was tired. She was tired. And then we heard on the radio the wind was gusting to 98mph.

Did I say I was tired? I was exhausted. In school all day, work that afternoon. Traveling to Denver and then first thing in the morning we were heading back home to another full day of school and work.

I’m tired just remembering how tired I was. At one point I started to drift off when I heard her say, “I just hope we don’t tip over!”

And there was no sleep for me that night.