Jim Shares…
Coming from the Gulf Coast, we were not used to hard freezing weather. Jim and Bonnie had one spare bedroom where Janie, Chris, Courtney, Kellie, and Caleb slept. Kevin and I stayed in the trailer. The temperatures dropped into the teens and single digits each night. The trailer was not suitable for such camping. We had one family from the Olive Branch church offer us an electric blanket that helped keep Kevin and me from freezing on those cold winter nights. Often the gas heater would go out in the middle of the night, and some nights it didn’t seem to matter whether or not the heater was on. I would go to bed with a glass of water next to me, and wake up a few hours later with a frozen piece of ice in the glass. The electric blanket saved our lives. We often risked our lives by sleeping with an electric heater running full blast between our heads on the small double bed in the trailer. Many mornings we would awake to find ourselves frozen in, because the door to the trailer would be frozen shut. We had to wait until someone in the house missed our smiling faces and come to our rescue by pouring hot water on the door lock. One morning as we stepped out of the trailer we witnessed a most beautiful anomaly. An oak tree next to Jim and Bonnie’s home had been covered in dew and then froze the night before. It looked like a glass tree as the sun bounced its rays off the glistening limbs. We had never seen such a beautiful site.