Good Morning.
I understand people who go south for the winter. When I was a kid we used to spend the month of February every year in Florida, and it was great, not only because of the weather, but because I could bag four weeks of school, sort of. I had to take along a load of assignments, and I had to do arithmetic, social studies, and spelling every morning in my shorts and bare feet, still not a bad deal. Today we call this arrangement home schooling, but you have to make a choice: you either home school or you don't, but you don't home school for a month in Florida.
The problem was, we had to go back to New England where it could snow the day after we got home with our perfect tans and pretty shells. The problem is that anywhere you go, the weather can whack you over the head in a minute. I've known folks who were evacuated because of weather upheavals straight out of the Old Testament. I've always admired the courage of those who schedule a wedding in a park or on the beach, only to wake up on the long-awaited day to conditions that have them scrambling to find an indoor space for two hundred.
Nevertheless, people are very protective of their weather. They make excuses for the fact that it's 120 in Arizona in August. "It's a dry heat," they declare and they're right. "The humidity is good for your skin," they say when they're soaked to the bone in Connecticut at the same time of the year. "Tornadoes never jump the river," they assure you in South Dakota. Wrong. I know of one that leapt across the Missouri and blew up the street only a block from my house. That was the time the cat, featured elsewhere on this blog, was having her kids in the basement.
We watch the weather on television with rapt attention. We used to refer to the person who stands in front of maps with swoops and colors as a weatherman, but now there's a weatherwoman and the solution is to call this person a meteorologist,
among the most impossible words to enunciate correctly. This individual is armed with something called Doppler radar that can predict the temperatures for the next week and explain why there are tree limbs all over the yard. It was an Alberta Clipper or El Nino or a hurricane that was always named for a female when I was dealing with multiplication tables on a dock in Florida. Now we have Benjamin, Henry, and Joe, and while I decry the destruction they cause, I applaud the political correctness.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
Comments