In Good Company

Little sister Valerie here.

I took the liberty of posting because as I was reading about the wind sweeping down the plain, I remembered an excerpt from a 1935 letter we have that Grandpa Ribley wrote to his family.  He and a buddy were traveling from California from Ohio and once the "weather" in Kansas, they ended up turning around and hitchiking back to California!  Here’s what he says about the plain states:

“Well I guess I’ll tell about the dust first.  We had dust all the way from Portales, N.M. but it wasn’t bad and we didn’t have it all the time.  We got as far as Dodge City, Kan. and that was that.  Most of the time people had their lights lit in the daytime.  When the wind didn’t blow, the dust fell like rain.  But when the wind blew it was terrible.  We thought it would let up and we could go on but it never did so we had to sell our car because we couldn’t drive it.  We hitch-hiked back, that’s why I never wrote because I knew Mom would worry.”

So it looks like fighting the wind in the plain states is a well-absorbed legacy.

And your grasshopper tales remind me of when we moved to Utah in the summer of ’82.  When I would ride my bike down the road, the grasshoppers would jump all around in a frenzy from every angle.  I always had beheaded carcasses in my spokes.  Ick. 

Love you – keep on pedaling!