1.07.2008

January Thaw



Ahh. Hello, spring. Okay, I know it's not really spring. But it's so nice outside: mild and breezy. The snow is melting. I could get used to this.

I have a funny wintertime habit, picked up in college, of jealously checking the weather in other cities to see which are warmer or colder than mine. As an undergrad in Central New York, I was convinced that I lived in the coldest place ever invented. The icy wind whipping across campus on February nights took my breath away. I remember walking to a meeting one evening with my roommate and guessing what the temperature was. She thought it was 20 degrees, but it seemed much colder than that to me. Later, we checked the weather and discovered that it was 5 degrees below zero, with a wind chill of -14. Egad! And we were outside in that stuff!

I constantly searched weather.com for the temperature in northern cities, places in Washington and Maine and Alaska, hoping to discover that things could be--and were--worse elsewhere. It sounds ridiculous, but consider: a professor of mine told me that she'd once looked up the temperature at the North Pole, only to find it warmer there than in our little town in CNY.

My fallback was always Barrow, Alaska, northernmost settlement in the U.S. I could almost always count on Barrow to be colder than Hamilton. But, lo! one bitterly cold night in 2005, I turned to Barrow for comfort and found that even the inhabitants of this town, situated 30 degrees of latitude to the north, were warmer than I. I was living in the Land That Warmth Forgot.

Now that I live in a city that enjoys both proximity to the ocean and the heat island effect, I still log on to weather.com occasionally and check up on good ol' Hamilton. And, you know, CNY is almost always ten degrees colder than Boston. Vindication! I wasn't delusional. It really is crazy cold out there.

New England (or at least my corner of it) may be cold in the winter, but it's a more charming kind of cold. It's a cold that brings picturesque snow and maple sap. It's an excuse to go to LLBean and get snowshoes, to sit by a wood stove, to drink hot chocolate with Kahlua. When temperatures go below 20, it's a Big Deal and the weather people start going bonkers. Winter ends in March here, like it's supposed to. Very civilized, don't you think?