Here I am, sitting at my desk with coffee pot perking in the background, thinking to myself that it’s so good to be alive and living in Ohio. I know, Ohio is not usually the first place most people think of when they dream of a vacation oasis or a warm place to retire but the more I see of the world around me, the more I like this little piece of earth I call home. Especially with the crazy storms brewing off the west coast and the horrible mess in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. Then there’s the sand storms in the deserts of Iraq and the 100+ temperatures in Australia. We Ohioans don’t know how good we have it sometimes. I’ve also noticed I’ve been complaining a lot about the winter rain and clouds and 30 degree weather here in the big city of Columbus (so wimpy, right?) so I’m going to take a moment and rattle off a few statistics I found that truly make me appreciate my surroundings:
1. The last natural disaster (if you can call it that) that I can recall in my fair city was in 2008, when Hurricane Ike hit Galveston, TX and then decided he wasn’t done there, taking everything out in his path all the way up into New England. We just happened to be on his party route – yes, there was a lot of damage. No, hundreds of thousands of people did not die and tent cities did not spring up in its aftermath.
2. Risk and Insurance magazine put out this list in 2005 of the 10 safest U.S. cities to live in with CowTown ranked as #4 (I like a nice even number). The perils that are included in the analysis are hurricanes, earthquakes, terrorism, severe thunderstorms, and winter storms.
1. Sacramento, CA
2. Phoenix, AZ
3. Rochester, NY
4. Columbus, OH
5. Buffalo, NY
6. Cincinnati, OH
7. Grand Rapids, MI
8. San Diego, CA
9. Pittsburgh, PA
10. Hartford, CT
3. Among the major cities in O-H-I-O, Columbus, in the central region, has an annual mean temperature of 51°F, with a normal maximum of 61°F and a normal minimum of 42°F. I don’t see any 100’s or -35’s in those numbers, do you?
4. My son lives in Las Vegas and for the second year in a row, it has snowed there. Not just the pretty snow-capped mountains that look beautiful on postcards, but snow that accumulated and turned the city upside down. I had to laugh when I visited there a few years ago in December and it snowed big fluffy flakes – I was taking a taxi from Caesar’s Palace to my hotel off the Strip and the cab driver had no clue about how to drive in the snow. I said, “pull over, Pal, I’ll take it from here.”
5. We get to enjoy (yes, drink that word in, folks!) the most wonderful four seasons that Mother Nature has to offer, with very little fanfare. I mean, look…it snows here in the winter (it’s SUPPOSED to snow in the winter), grass turns a lush green in the Spring (remember what it felt like to run barefoot through that stuff? I do, I do!), there’s good, old-fashioned swimming in the summer (along with baseball and apple pie), and Fall is my absolute fav time of year (brilliant leaves falling from the trees and apple cider on the deck). You miss all this living in Hawaii or Mississippi or Barbados.
My heart aches for Haiti, just as it ached for New Orleans and Thailand. The devastation will be felt for many years to come, And it’s really, really hard to comprehend the magnitude of so much suffering from the safety and security of my Columbus, Ohio living room but I pray that we and the rest of our world will continue coming to their aid, long after CNN stops covering it.
Kuddos to Columbus. You really are my kind of town.
