Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
Today children from the Catholic school across the street from Nazareth Home Clifton spent the day working in its central courtyard. They weeded, planted flowers, mulched–and probably learned something about both gardening and community service while enjoying a different type of school day.
Louisville is a really beautiful city, something I am becoming more aware of and am enjoying more since I returned from Cambodia and started riding my bike through neighborhoods I never knew before. Today I had a 28-mile ride from Nazareth Home Clifton where I live to Iroquois Park in South Louisville where I used to live. Here is a photo on one of the lookouts in the park. Basically all you see is trees but under those trees are 150-year old neighborhoods and city streets. The city is green, not barren suburbs (we have those, too).
Iroquois Park is one of five parks inside the city which were laid out by Olmsted, the celebrated urban planner who designed Central Park, a masterpiece of landscape architecture, in New York City.
Cambodia only has two seasons, hot and wet and hot and dry. Different trees have fruits and flowers at different times but everything is always green, leaves don’t fall off trees like in parts of the U.S.
It’s my first spring time in the U.S. in 40 years and I’m really enjoying it! The cold weather seems to have finally (almost) disappeared and everything is in bloom!
This morning dawned rather cold and cloudy but by mid day, everything had changed. There was a really bright blue sky that invited me to a ride through Louisville’s magnificent Cherokee Park. The uncommonly cold and snowy winter was with us just a day or two ago but now the smallest buds are starting to appear.
One powerful realization for me when I was wandering in the forested area of The Grotto in Portland, Oregon was how much I had missed forests of large hardwood trees while I was in Asia. From my days in the Boy Scouts and from our Dittmeier family camping trips (the only vacations we could afford), I have loved being out in the forests. At The Grotto I was able to be with huge, old trees that brought back good memories and renewed my love of nature.
We have had two significant snowfalls here in Louisville this winter (3″ is a significant amount here) and today looked like it was going to be a repeat. A few icy pellets hit me in the face as I bicycled home about 3:00 PM, and then the snow really started coming down. It was all for naught, though, and an hour later there was nothing on the ground.
Last night we had another snowfall that was almost a carbon copy of the previous three-inch snowfall last week. Again it occurred during the night and greeted us in the morning and was about three inches. The big difference is that this time much of the snow melted quickly and it was never a problem on the streets.
Today I had a meeting after lunch and was debating how I could go when I depend on my bicycle for getting around. I went outside at Nazareth Home above and the sidewalks there and the nearby streets look reasonably cleared and usable for a bike.
The temperature, though, was in the high 20ºs and low 30ºs, and I learned over the last weekend my fingers–even with ski gloves–could only take about 15 minutes of that. My earlier rides were REALLY painful, so I was happy to learn today that another priest was going to the same meeting and I could ride with him–in a car. The trip was smooth and warm and I got to see more beautiful scenes from this winter’s first real snow.
Just three inches of snow fell last night but the effect has been stunning. Kentucky frequently gets a couple inches of snow but if it is not gone in two or three hours, it probably is only patchy after the first night and doesn’t last more than a day or two.
This present snow is a heavy, thick, sticky snow that has covered everything and is still sticking to the trees, wires, fences, houses, and everything exposed. Driving around the city reveals beautiful panoramas of winter bliss. After 40 years in temperate Asia with no snow, it’s a real joy for me.