Snow and Birth: God's Artistry

When I checked the time this morning, January 14, 2025, it was 10:22 and my mind went back to January 18, 1976.  It was a cold, fourteen degrees at 4 AM, morning and my firstborn son entered into the world at 10:22 AM.  It was a Sunday morning full of joy, hope, and the uncertainty of the future.

Back then fathers had a room to wait for newborns.  We were not allowed in the delivery room.  There were several dads nervously waited for the Stork’s delivery.  One by one, nurses retrieved dads to meet the arrivals.  Suddenly, they called for Mr. Hopper.  I jumped to my feet and entered my wife’s room where little Andy Lee Hopper lay on his mother’s stomach.  He had a yellow hue.  I jokingly asked her, “Where did you get the little Asian baby?”  

As she hugged Andy tight and forced a smile, she said he was yellow jaundice.  She said they are going to put him under some lights for treatment.  Andy was so cute laying with only a pair of colored glasses for clothing.  I would stand at the babies’ window and soak in the moments that seem as only yesterday.  Forty-eight years later, I have collected scores of precious memories especially those of birthdays.

January 18 typically involves cold and usually snow.  Snow in Alabama is rare but around the third week in January the probability increases dramatically.  There was snow last Friday, the 10^th and the immediate forecast for next week calls for more snow and frigid cold.  Snow is God’s way of blessing us with snow on Andy’s birthday.  His first snow was his first birthday.  We did not keep a record, but we did a big snow on his sixteenth birthday and several in between.

One snow birthday, a neighbor, now an aunt had a Honda three-wheeler.  They were outlawed later and a rare find today but fun especially in the snow.  Andy had the best time laughing as he slipped and sledded in the winter wonderland.  I can still see his rosy, red cheeks, laugher, and smile atop the big tired, red, motorized tricycle. 

As he got older and Three-wheelers outlawed, Honda added a tire and created four-wheelers.  His aunt and uncle surprised him with pulling him on a plastic kiddy swimming pool behind the four-wheeler.  He looked like Santa on a sleigh.

Any lives in San Antonio, Texas now.  I doubt that he will get snow there on his birthday but if we get it here it will be a time of reflection.  Snow and birthdays are God’s miracles.  Each snowflake and each birth are unique.  Once a baby and the hope and fears of another generation, he became an artistic man.  The first-born grandson of the Hopper family is followed by a sister, brother, and 49 cousins.

I remember daddy holding his first grandson at Granny Hopper’s wake.  The joy he had is priceless.  Momma loved Andy so much that love still radiates in our memories.  If they could only witness the increase that began with Andy, they would be proud.

“As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater.” Isaiah 55:10

It began with you.  Happy birthday son!

Love dad

WINTER STORM WARNING

The National Weather forecast for the American Southeast for January 10, 2025, predicts a winter storm.  There is not anything more devastating and initiating panic for people in Alabama to hear than WINTER STORM WARNING.  Alabamians just do stupid stuff and create shortages, chaos, and waste.

 

Having lived in Illinois on the Wisconsin state line, I experienced snow, lots of it.  When I started kindergarten in 1958, I experienced a snowstorm for the first time.  I opened the car door to have violent winds blowing snow.  Daddy had gotten me a bag of cheese curls for a snack and the wind ripped the bag from my hands and scattered those delicious cheese curls in the snow.  The yellow against the white was etched in my mind.  It was beautiful and overwhelming at the same time.  My bag was gone with the north wind and my little heart broken.  I started to cry.  Daddy said it would be okay and handed me another bag that he had bought for him.  I figured that the Abdominal Snowman had a yellow treats in the snow that was very deep for a small boy.

 

When I started the first grade, momma received a list of things that were required for men to attend South Beloit Elementary.  Momma had never been out of Alabama.  The list was foreign to her.  I had to have a snowsuit and snow galoshes.  Believe it or not I walked to school in the snow.  First time I wore my new galoshes someone stole them and replaced mine with an old worn pair.  Momma was not happy with those Yankees.  Snow was part of living up North.

 

Back in Alabama, snow, which is more ice than flakes paralyze.  Stores run out of milk, bread, and cold cuts.  It was 1985 when a winter storm paralyzed central Alabama.  It was a Wednesday night, and I was returning home from conducting a Prayer Meeting for a pastor friend who was out of town.  The rain fell and temperature dropped as rain turned to sleet and ice.  I can close my eyes and visualize the windshield wipers as they moved pushing the frozen Slushy.

 

Nothing really accumulated and we went to bed.  Around three in the morning there was an eerie silence.  The electricity was off.  I heard from time sounds as a shotgun shooting in the woods.  I looked out the bedroom window and it bright white.  Going to the back deck of the house I stepped into snow, about a foot deep.  The sound was limbs from a pine ticket breaking under the weight of the snow.  As daylight came, my neighbors and I discovered that electric power lines were down everywhere.  It was not good for all of us with total electric homes, but I did have and use a fireplace to help heat the house.

 

From Wednesday night to Sunday afternoon, we had no power.  We mattresses and cover to the great room where the fireplace was.  I used it to cook meals.  My son Andy and daughter Angel loved it.  They said it was like camping.  I moved all the refrigerated food to the snowbank on the back deck.  County water continued and I heated water in five-gallon buckets by the fireplace.  By Sunday power was back.

 

That Friday night I decide I would take a bath.  My wife asked how I would do that.  I told her like I had for most of my life.  We did not have and inside bathroom until the spring of my senior year of high school.  My family washed in a foot tube with water heated by the potbellied stove.  She laughed until I appeared clean, shaved, and hair washed.  Saturday night she asked if I could heat her some water.

 

The next year, 1986, we had another winter storm.  It was almost the same scenario but worse.  Fearing another winter storm people went crazy.  We had an extra frig in the basement.  Living in the country you buy enough food stuff to last a week or longer.  I asked if we needed anything, and my wife said a gallon of milk.

 

One again it was a Wednesday night, and I went to the local Wally World (Wal-Mart) to buy a gallon of milk.  I went the store, and I encounter pandemonium.  People panicked. There were people pushing a buggy of milk and pulling another full of break.  I stopped amazed and puzzled.  The store was out of milk.  Pushing and shoving everywhere.  Frighten people ran and screamed.  I thought just what it will look like if the world was ending.

 

Suddenly a man yelled, “Winn-Dixie has a truck load of milk!”  I imagined it looked as did the Hebrews when they left Egypt.  I went to the car and drove to Winn-Dixie where a tractor-trailer loaded with milk was unloading.  It was the same as Wal-Mart.  I got a gallon of milk, out my index finger in the handle, threw it across my shoulder, and proceeded to the checkout line.

 

I man pushing a full buggy of milk and pulling a buggy of bread stopped me and asked, “That all the milk you gonna get?”

 

I replied, “Yep, all I need.”

 

He reminded that there was a winter storm coming.  I told him that this is Alabama and how long does snow stay on the ground especially since the ground is not frozen, three maybe four days.

 

It did last for four days.  A neighbor went to check on folks in our country community.  He found a family that had made fun of our country/backward way of life.  The Birmingham transplants did not have any electricity due to down lines, no water because the pumping stations had no power, and no heat trying to burn green logs in a fireplace.

 

My neighbor invited the family to his house where his wife had a hot breakfast with biscuits, hot coffee, and a warm house.  After thawing out and returning home, my neighbor gave them some dry wood, showed them how to start a fire with kindling.  From then on the Birmingham transplants had a different attitude toward county folks.

 

Nowadays I question what has happened to common sense?   I like what a fellow Alabamian said, “A country boy can survive.”

 

 "As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease."  Matthew 24:22

Snow on Your Birthday

 It snowed on a Sunday on the third week in January on the Alabama ground

It was as special and unique as you as the snowflakes falling around

 

Looking forward to snow around the eighteenth reminds me of you

It is something that only the God of all creation can do

 

Snowflakes, babies, and new days are His special gifts He gives

Each only lasts for a short time the longer each of us lives

 

Snowflakes last a few days, babies for a few months, and new days a day

That is what makes the extraordinary and exceptional come our way

 

The snow on your first birthday was one a magnificent moment in our time

Followed by other birthday snows your sixth and sixteenth are memories of mine

 

Your sixteenth was a trip to eat Chinese in a blizzard was fun when we returned home

Stranded in the deep ice and snow we feared as the car slide and started to roam

 

Each time the snow falls, I think of how wonderfully and uniquely created you are   

My son I pray that your birthday gives you all you want and desire

 

The snow is gone for your birthday and you are far away in Texas somewhere

I miss you and long to be with you to watch the snow flying in the air

 

Andy’s 46^th Birthday poem – bobby e. hopper, January 18, 2022

A Picture of Hell and the Hope of the Resurrection

You can tell when spring is near when you hear birds chirping, smell the aroma of trees and vines budding, see the countless colored daffodils, and taste food from the grill.  Spring is my favorite time of the year.  Everything is coming to life.  It makes Easter special.  It reminds us that the dead of winter and its long dark hours are gone.

I am one of the few that enjoys winter.  When serving the Bethel Baptist Associational Disaster Relief Chain Saw team, I enjoyed snow in Missouri after an ice storm.  Well, I enjoyed the cold and the snow.  It reminded me of living in Illinois as a kid.  No, I am not a Yankee.  As the group ALABAMA sings, “My home is Alabama, Southern Born, and Southern Bred.”  Daddy worked up north for three years.  We moved back home to Alabama in the spring of 1960 because Mamma did not like the Yankees, the cold, and the snow.

Spring reminds me of going home, the eternal one.  It is the promise of eternal life found in the resurrection of Jesus.  Daddy died on Friday after Easter April 29, 1984.  I remember the morning I left the hospital.  The birds were singing, the morning sun glistened, and you could smell the aroma of spring.  I thought about what a beautiful day for daddy to go home with Jesus.

Doctors diagnosed momma with stage four-melanoma cancer in the fall of 1986 and she died in the winter in January.  Her last days were difficult.  The demon cancer consumed her beautiful body.  The funeral director said her body was as a piece of wood that looked solid until you picked it up, and then realized that, it was rotten and it crumbled in your hands.

It snowed days before her death.  With her arm eaten into from cancer, she watched me build a snowman from her hospital window.  I knocked on her window and made a face.  Hours later, the Clanton Hospital transferred her to the University of Alabama Birmingham Hospital.  I rode with her in the emergency vehicle.  I remember it snowing as we unloaded in downtown Birmingham.

They placed her in the terminal ward.  If there was a picture of hell it was the night I spent with her.  Seven people, including a young boy, young mother, and elderly man died that night.  Patients throughout the whole ward cried out in agony and pain. 

I had never been around such torment before.  I heard the cries of a young boy as he cried for his mother to hold him and stop the pain.  The lady in the room with momma would speak in a little girl's voice.  She said, “Daddy, please hold me.”  She repeated it over and over.  Momma would say, “Oh God, help me.”  She repeated this over and over.  I lay there with a feeling of hopelessness.  My pain seemed insignificant compared to those who died that night. 

I have thought about that night many times.  I went home, my back in severe pain from the stress, and stared at the ceiling.  I could not sleep, eat, work, study, read, etc.  I was useless and wanting to die.  This is how I pictured hell.  I was glad that this was the only torment that momma would endure.  When she died, my sister, my brothers, and I thanked God that she entered heaven where the flowers bloom forever and she would receive a new beautiful body.

And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom (Luke 16:23).

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand (John 10:27-28)

Resurrection morning Jesus solidified His promise, I am the resurrection, and the life.