Ahhhh, New England weather.
It's reasonably nice today -- a little overcast but warm,
about 60 degrees. I go to the store
because it has been weeks since I did a decent shopping trip. When I come out of the store, the sky has
turned an ominous shade of bruise: blue, gray, black, and green. I load the groceries into the back, return
the cart to the building, and start for the driver's side of my car.
Without any warning beyond the sky color, a gust of wind
grips the parking lot, rolling across like a tsunami, sending errant carts
flying, creating dirt devils of sand along the tar, and dropping the
temperature about fifteen degrees in an instant. The wind blows my door open, which is fine
because the person who parked next to me had the brains to give me a wide
berth, and my sweater flaps around behind me like loose skin gone rogue.
I am not in the car five seconds when it starts to rain,
small drops at first. By the time I'm
out of the lot and on the main drag, the drops are the size of strawberries,
splatting against the windshield at nearly sideways angles, and making big
plops against the glass as the wipers attempt to keep pace. It's pouring and squalling and the
temperature continues to fall.
On the way home, I pass people walking with babies in
carriages, college students with arms full of packages, a woman leaving the
library wearing a summer t-shirt, and a man riding his bicycle. All of these people fall victim to the sudden
storm's angry turn. Though the rain is
intense, it is also brief, less than ten minutes. The sun recovers; the air never does. While I unload the car, the wind is whipping
across the patio and my sweater is no longer enough protection to ward off the
shivering chill.
I turn on the news and discover it is snowing in the western
half of the state. Of course it is. It was just short-sleeve weather and now it's
time to take out the snowshoes again.
Oh, who am I kidding? This is New
England. We never put the damn snowshoes
away in the first place; that doesn't happen until mid-June, if at all.
I laugh when people say it's tough to travel between warm
and cold climates because it may be sub-zero at
one's starting destination and
boiling hot at the ending destination, as if catching pneumonia is
inevitable.
Ridiculous.
That's just a normal spring (or fall) day for us: heat blasting in the morning; air conditioner
blasting in the afternoon. Hasn't killed
that many of us yet. There's a reason we
New Englanders are referred to as hardy. Of course, we're also referred to as wicked insane. We can't help ourselves; we're bred for
extremes.
We're similar to the weather like that.
