In one hour we’re picking up our daughter, Sheila at the Fargo airport. This will be her first trip to Minnesota and we’re hoping to entice her and pull out all the stops. Most likely it’s too much to ask that she would fall in love,  want to pull up stakes and become a junior snowbirdredux, but one can always dream. Therefore, it is imperative that the sky, the prairie, the many lakes, put on their best show.

We feel sure that she will like Mt. Faith – the garden is glowing.

And the extended Johnson clan – who wouldn’t rejoice in all that fun and hijinx.

Our many new friends – a given.

Absence of traffic congestion – huzzah!

There’s only one snag. This is the week that decided to break all heat records. And – the mosquitos have arrived.

Of course the heat is not exclusive to Minnesota. A small town in Kansas was the hottest place in the WORLD one day last week. The east coast is suffering. Colorado is burning. The whole country is under a deluge of HOT. A new type of storm is being bandied about, one that appears to accompany these insufferable temperatures. It’s called a DERECHO, from the Spanish for “straight ahead” because it evidently springs up without warning and produces “straight line” winds up to 80 miles per hour which last an alarmingly long time. Sounds like another major deal breaker to the moving-across-the-country strategem.

Our favorite weatherman, Paul Douglas, who is highly respected as a meteorologist geek extraordinaire, has been beating the global warming drums lately. He manages to slip in a “don’t you get it!” dig in each day’s column of the Twin Cities Star Tribune.  As in – “Wake up! IT’S happening.” Paul goes way beyond Minnesota in his climate influence (google his blog). He has created five weather related companies and even provided software to Steven Spielberg for Jurassic Park and Twister. One of his business’ is called Digital Cyclone and provides weather reports for cell phones.

One quote from his blog: “The problem for those who dismiss climate change as a figment of scientist’s imagination, or even as a crypto-socialist one worldish plot to take away our God given SUV’s, is that the data is beginning to add up. This is a preview of human-caused climate change.”

In the meantime, I’m having enough trouble fighting the powers-that-be who  insist on a plan to divert the Red River of the North and flood my family heritage. While, at the same time, beating the drum to somehow, finally, get a viable farmer’s market in place, here in Fergus Falls. Yet – climate change may just flood it all before the Army Corps of Engineers get their project accomplished. And the sweltering heat or straight line winds may just put the small farmer out of business.

Oh dear. I think I’ll pour a cold drink and sit and look with nostalgia at our friend Mickie Edmond’s painting of the Pacific Coastline in California.

Before the sea level rises.