2006.08.07: August 7, 2006: Headlines: COS - Thailand: Marriage: Columbia Daily Tribune: Thailand RPCV Cathy Salter says:Traditional county fairs and family weddings are a cause for celebration. They represent a welcome return to normalcy in chaotic times.
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2006.08.07: August 7, 2006: Headlines: COS - Thailand: Marriage: Columbia Daily Tribune: Thailand RPCV Cathy Salter says:Traditional county fairs and family weddings are a cause for celebration. They represent a welcome return to normalcy in chaotic times.
Thailand RPCV Cathy Salter says:Traditional county fairs and family weddings are a cause for celebration. They represent a welcome return to normalcy in chaotic times.
Mike Cook from Colby, Wis., met and married Juanamaria - a bright and energetic Uruguayan beauty. The two remain a loving marriage of distant geographies and unique personalities enriched by three sons and a daughter.
Thailand RPCV Cathy Salter says:Traditional county fairs and family weddings are a cause for celebration. They represent a welcome return to normalcy in chaotic times.
Comforting normalcy cools heat of unsettling times
By CATHY SALTER
Published Monday, August 7, 2006
[Excerpt]
These hot August days, I dress as I did years ago in Bangkok’s steamy, monsoon-season heat - in a sleeveless top and lightweight cloth sarong. I move about barefooted or in sandals easily slipped off and on as I exit and enter the coolness of the house. Light meals revolve around locally grown corn eaten with tomatoes and grilled yellow squash from our garden.
Forgetting the heat for a couple of days, Kit and I drove to Nebraska for a wedding. Our route took us north on Highway 63 to Macon, then west on Highway 36 to St. Joseph. From there, we followed Interstate 29 into western Iowa, finally crossing the Missouri River on an old toll bridge just south of Omaha. It was a splendid route lined with fields of tassling corn and bushy green soybeans, traversed by few trucks and little traffic. Along the 330-mile journey, we soaked in summer farmscapes as a romantic novel set in Tuscany was read to us on tape.
Jonathan Michael Nicholas Cook was to marry Theresa Elizabeth Weinberg that evening - July 28, 2006 - at St. John’s Church in Omaha. Nick’s parents, Michael and Juanamaria Cordones-Cook, had invited us to join their extended family and friends for the wedding and reception afterwards on the Creighton University campus. Over the past few years, we’ve shared wonderful meals at the Cordones-Cook family table and each year welcome in the New Year with their family. We’ve gotten to know their son, Alexander and more recently Nick after his return from two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the South Pacific.
In the late 1960s, Nick’s dad Michael was a Peace Corps volunteer in Uruguay about the time that I was assigned to Thailand. Mike Cook from Colby, Wis., met and married Juanamaria - a bright and energetic Uruguayan beauty. The two remain a loving marriage of distant geographies and unique personalities enriched by three sons and a daughter. Nick and Theresa’s marriage promises to be equally as loving and enduring.
In these times of stressed crops and livestock, rockets raining across the Israeli-Lebanese border, and a world at odds over what to do about it, traditional county fairs and family weddings are a cause for celebration. They represent a welcome return to normalcy in chaotic times. For a few magic moments, they set our hearts dancing, even on the hottest of summer nights.
Cathy Salter is a geographer and columnist who lives with her husband, Kit, in southern Boone County at a place they call Boomerang Creek.
When this story was posted in September 2006, this was on the front page of PCOL:
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Story Source: Columbia Daily Tribune
This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Thailand; Marriage
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