Holy snowdrift!

Those few of you who read this blog every now and then must think I have an obsession with snow. Not so do I have an obsession with snow. But by damn, do I fancy my green eggs and ham. Okay enough Seusseneugen. Hey, I don’t know if that means anything but if it really is a word and it means something really bad, sorry. I don’t Sprechen Sie Deutsch.

My longtime friend Sally, who lives in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, sent me the snow picture right after I woke up this morning and it must have not been long after she woke up. I was watching the Weather Channel and noticed on the map that nothing but snow was on it from Boston to the west. I went to my e-mail and found Sally had by then sent these pictures to her friends, including truly yours or whatever.

Waking in a winter wonderland called Berkshire County, Mass. Photo by Sally McLaughlin

It isn’t I am obsessed with snow. It’s that I am obsessed with wondering how people can live all or most of their lives where it’s cold.  Why???

I know, it’s pretty, the snow is. It’s nice to have seasons. In the region in which Sal lives they have probably the most gorgeous-looking autumn foliage in the United States. There are trade-offs, I know.

Here on the Upper Texas Coast today the wind chill has been in the 30s. We see days once in a blue moon where it stays below freezing all day and sometimes longer than that. We get ice. We get snow. Plus we get rain, lots of it, tornadoes, hurricanes, and steaming freaking hot weather that is humid enough to smother an elephant.

And those who live in the cold all the time don’t do a dance of joy each and every time they see winter storms like the one they had today. I am  not going to repeat what Sally said in a follow up e-mail regarding all of this crazy weather.

You have to admit, though, it is pretty fascinating what it is that draws one to the place they live. It can be a place of family, one gal, or one guy, a place of memories, of having whatever it is in a place that one needs, the world’s best tacos, the list goes on. What about those place near the Arctic Circle that have sun-lit days for 24 hours during the summer? I think I mentioned here before that I had a real homesickness for rain during the seven years I lived in Central Texas where the rainfall averaged only half or so the amount of  rain that falls here in Southeast Texas annually. I guess of what I speak is geographical sociology. I enjoyed the 18 college hours of sociology I took, so maybe that is part of my fascination.

I just can’t help but wonder how people live where they do. In Western Massachusetts during the winter? In Alaska in the summer? In Central Texas during cedar fever season? Anywhere along the Gulf of Mexico during hurricane season? In Beaumont, Texas, in the humiditity. Oh, the latter is where I live.

See what I mean?

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