Headline Southern News: It's in the THIRTIES!

Why do weathercasters always act surprised and wax dramatic when the weather does what it's always done at a particular time of year? Like all news today, even the weather must be "sold" to the viewing public, lest people switch to another, more electrifying account of today's temperature and forecast.

A cold front moved in yesterday. Today it dipped into the thirties. I wore a fleece jacket to work! Headline news! We'll have a few weeks of chilly weather, cold by Southern standards, and the temperature will rise again (just like the South!), and by March, the crepe myrtles will be thinking about blooming. Could be worse. Cousin Carlos lives in upstate New York now, and we hear his tales of heavy-duty snow shoveling, blinding blizzards, cutting winds, and ice on the car windshield.


Sometimes in autumn, I grow sentimental about the northern foliage. I haven't seen a striking one since leaving Maine. Here in South Georgia, the leaves change late, and mildly, into gentle yellows and timid oranges. In December, you notice the new colors as you drive along, but they're not dramatic. When I see calendar photos of Vermont or New Hampshire, all ablaze with red and orange leaves, I can almost feel the invigorating chill and smell the woodsmoke in the air. As a high school student in upstate New York, I climbed different Adirondack Mountains in September and October, as part of the school's Hiking Club. The fresh air, the promise of pending winter, somehow seemed pleasant and comforting at the time, maybe because I'd never known anything else. Whenever I tell L. about any sentiment about my Homeland, especially during foliage season, he, without hesitation, reminds me that it's now 25 degrees in Cincinatti or 35 in Boston, and snow flakes were spitting into the stadium during a football game he was just watching. "And the people were all wearing heavy coats and hats and shivering---and it's only October!" he'll say.


A few winters ago, I was temporarily cured of any recurring fantasy of wanting to "go home again." We were in Washington for Christmas, and it was unseasonably horrible. They said that the wind chill factor was especially brutal. Knife-cutting, eye-watering cold sliced right through my jeans, my coat, my gloves, my scarf, my hat. I was truly suffering in the short runs between the car and the stores. "Are you sure you want to go back North?" laughed L., as I whimpered in the back seat of the car, waiting for the heat to come on. "Never!" I replied. I could hardly enunciate the words, with my frozen jaw.

I've never really considered leaving the South, but the sentiment for the North resurfaces now and then. My family, since stepping off whatever boat it was, has always lived in the North, for many generations, so a certain attachment to that region and its culture remains with me. Periodically, I think fondly of the cool summer evenings, the fireflies, the lilacs and peonies, Lake Champlain, the Green Mountains, the Adirondacks, the flaming colors in fall. But right now, with the outside temperature way down in the thirties, the house is too chilly for me, and I've had to turn the heat on. Now I remember why I like the South.