The Collins Family

Dear friends,

Greetings from the lovely Amazon Basin. I’m sitting here at the keyboard overlooking the Ucayali River and listening to streaming classical Christmas music on the Internet. It’s 80 degrees at 7:00 AM. I’m a morning person. It just doesn’t get much better than this. I’m thinking of Nancy in Ashland where it’s 32 degrees with a winter mix. I’ll see her, Lord enabling, in just a week. But for now, we’re nearing the first day of summer here in the southern hemisphere. Yesterday I saw a four-foot long iguana and a coatimundi (sort of a cross between a racoon and an anteater).

A friend of mine had a buddy in college that everyone called “That’s nothin’” because no matter how outrageous an experience you may have had, he always responded with “That’s nothin,’” and he would then proceed to tell an even more outrageous saga.

Dear and good friends,

Greetings from the Amazon basin. It’s still 81 degrees and 80% humidity at 10:00 at night. I’m hoping it will rain later to cool things down, and it might. I heard thunder earlier today.

Thanksgiving is coming up, which starts the holidays in my book. I will start listening to streaming Christmas carols, and I might string some green and red streamers or something from my yellow and tan walls. Actually, we get lots of color from the local vegetation. There are all kinds of tropical plants and orchids (actually bromeliads) around that you pay big bucks for at home, but here they just shoot up by themselves. I’m staying in a small house just a few hundred feet from an oxbow lake on the Ucayali River, the main tributary to the Amazon, which is born about 400 miles downstream from my perch. Small fishing boats drift along and others, powered by small peque-peque engines putter by at all hours of the day and night.