How does this differ from sitting in the comfort of the Indiana home? BBBH sits across the table [as at home] and works the Scrabble magic [just as at home]. The temperature is the same as it is [at home]; though here it is provided by the weather [unlike home, where Vectren delivers the gas and we deliver the cash]. And they tell me that if one steps outside at home, the Arctic blast will chill you to the bone.
It has been suggested that I minimize the emphasis on the weather here, lest it seem like gloating; but we don't make the weather, we just go where we like it.
Edinburg is a thriving town of about 50,000 souls and is a center of agricultural enterprise, as the entire Rio Grande Valley is given to cropping, from truck produce to cotton to cane, melons to peaches, to whatever the farmer chooses to grow, more or less. Perhaps more cleverly, aragula to zucchini. Moreover, the entire Valley increases dramatically in population during the winter months, as the "Winter Texans" take up their temporary residence here. We are included.
The village was originally called Chapin after a Dennis Chapin. He, however, was involved in a homicide in a barroom in San Antonio in the early part of the twentieth century, and the residents of the town decided they needed a new name. It was named for the birthplace of one of the leading citizens, which was Edinburgh, Scotland. Don't know what happened to the aitch.
Edinburg is the seat of Hidalgo County and lies about 18 miles north of the river and probably forty miles west of Harlingen. (Based on memory of driving a couple of years ago. You check the map.)
Our park does not have cable TV, and we do not have a satellite dish, so it's "over the air." We receive nicely 27 channels. Fourteen of them are Spanish language.
2 comments:
My charming in-laws live in Texas - DFW area. It was amazing to me to realize how long one can drive to go from the northern to southernmost regions of one state: especially compared with, say, Rhode Island, or Connecticut, or any of those states that get swept up with several others in their local daily weather reports.
I think it takes confidence to live in such wide, bare spaces, exposed to sun and heat and elements and anyone within a twenty mile radius!
I enjoy the snug hills wrapped around my shoulders in Kentucky; I feel hidden, and safe, and tucked in. Mountains and valleys, hill and dale; but my brother, though he enjoys it here, grows wistful when he thinks of the flat farmland of Indiana.
I read the other day that patriotism is simply longing for what we ate when we were children. I like that twist; and I think it's true, gastronomically and with landscape - though I have to reach back a few Scottish generations to understand my love of hill and dale!
I particularly like your imagery of "snug hills wrapped around my shoulders --hidden and safe, and tucked in."
Having been raised in the mountains and high plains of Colorado, it took a bit of time for me to become accustomed to the table-top landscape of our Hoosier county. This, I think, is why our friends and neighbors build dirt mounds and haul in boulders for landscaping in their yards--so that they have some relief (protection?) from the openness of flat. (??)
As a child, I ate lots of beans and cornpone. Hmmm.
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