By CAROLINE CARMICHAEL / Staff Writer

What a month. Much happened in January 18 at local, national and international levels.

One certainly wonders what this start could indicate for the remainder of the year.

Perhaps Chilton County is off to an interesting start.

In January 2018 in Chilton County,

• Schools and businesses experienced nearly a full “snow week”
• Verbena Fire and Rescue paid off all debt
• Four Chilton County High School students were named to the UA Early College honors list
• CCHS won all three county tournaments (varsity boys, varsity girls and junior varsity)

At a national level, much of the news has been unfortunately negative.

Just in January, 13 school shootings took place. A shooting at a school in Los Angeles on Feb. 1 upped the count to 14 school shootings in the U.S. thus far in the year 2018.

Mudslides have devastated Californian landscapes, their pernicious tides snuffing the lives of 20 people and burying the whereabouts of four individuals still missing, as of a Jan. 15 report.

On Jan. 13, Hawaiians received a false-alarm “ballistic missile inbound” text warning residents to seek immediate cover.

The month ended with a Jan. 31 State of the Union address by President Donald Trump, reviewing 2017 and presenting U.S. plans for 2018.

A notable global event both opened and closed the first month of 2018.

A super moon, which is the term given the moon at its closest proximity to the earth, occurred on both Jan. 1 and Jan. 31.

The Jan. 1 super moon was the largest — or closest — super moon of 2018.

Yet the super moon on Jan. 31 proved the most impressive, dubbed by scientists as a “super blue blood moon.”

It was a super moon, which happened to also be a blue moon — the second full moon in a single month — and a total lunar eclipse, nicknamed a “blood moon” because of the red hue the earth’s atmosphere refracts upon the moon’s surface during totality.

What does this mean to the nation, to the world, to Chilton County?

The ancients believed such signs in the heavens to be omens.

Traditionally, the people of God have viewed such events as indicators of God’s hand at work — the emergence of scientific knowledge only emphasizing the perfect precision of God’s timing of events.

I guess we shall see.

Here’s to one month down and 11 interesting months to come.