Below Zero (F) Report

I have NEVER liked cold weather. Not from when I was a little kid. Sure, there were a couple of isolated fun moments swooping down the hill at the Oakley Country Club in Belmont, Mass, on Flexible Flyer when I was in grade school, but trudging around on my paper route as a teen on blustery winter afternoons beneath a slate grey sky in Orleans on Cape Cod rather sucked. Especially the pain associated with my toes thawing out when I got back home. And there’s the story about how, one bitterly cold night in Canton, MO, where I was attending college in 1960, I went to see “Where The Boys Are” which led me to transferring to the University of Miami in Coral Gables, FL.

After the plane touched down at MIA in August of ’61, the door opened to 95F heat and humidity of around 98% and I said, “I’m HOME!!!” I spent 47 years, off and on, living in Florida. I moved to Mount Peculiar, Ohio, last April. It’s the first time since 1976 that I’ve lived somewhere that didn’t have palm trees! (Besides Florida there was Antibes, France; on the Riviera, and Chiriqui Province, Republic of Panama) Today when I woke up it was MINUS six degrees Fahrenheit. Totally YUCK.

I always got a chuckle when I’d ask new transplants from the Great White North to Florida how they liked it. So often their answer was that they “missed the seasons.” Well, even south Florida has four seasons, and I’m not just talking about “Tourist Season,” though from the time I moved down there until the present you can now barely tell when the snowbirds arrive it has become so crowded.

Seasons in Florida are subtle. Not the blatant in-your-face crudeness of the northern tier of states. In Florida you have to leave the sheltered womb of your air conditioned home/car/office/mall and pay attention. There’s a definite, though impossible to define, change in the character of the temperature between winter and spring in Florida. Different plants are suddenly flowering. The breeze caresses your cheek a bit differently. Daily, afternoon frog-choking thunder storms mean it’s summer time if you can’t figure it out from the heat and humidity. Fall has a different scent. You notice that the rayless sunflowers and the slender blazing stars are back in bloom. The arrival of white pelicans announce that winter’s coming.\

None of that up north. Open your front door and a five below zero (Fahrenheit) breeze punches you in the face as you notice there’s three feet of snow on the sidewalk. You don’t have to be too alert to figure out it’s effin’ WINTER, jerk!