THIS time of year the rest of the country is bundling up for the winter. My mother in Maine reported Thanksgiving Day temperatures in the low 20s when I called on the holiday. That reminded me of long-ago gray November afternoons spent putting up storm windows, banking leaves over the flower beds and packing screen doors away in the garage while a cold wind delivered the first white flakes of winter. Lessons winter
could teach usHawaii is blessed with the best climate on the planet, but unbroken weeks of tradewind-cooled sunny days, touched by just enough windward and mauka shower activity to dress up the mountains with rainbows, lull us into a false sense of security.
The rains that came on Election Day and persisted for 12 days left our old News Building a shambles of soggy ceiling panels, plastic sheets draped over computers and wet carpets smelling inexplicably of cat.
Elsewhere, neglected debris clogged storm drains all around the island, closing roads, slowing highway traffic to a crawl, damaging homes and releasing pollution.
Now that the sun's out again, it's easy to forget. After all, would they call it paradise if we had to worry about rainy days?
It's a state of mind. Certain that sooner or later things will get worse, our northern countrymen get ready. It could be storm windows, or a rainy-day fund built into the state budget. They could teach us something.
