08/30/2007

No predicting this summer's great weather

By Betty Werth
Local columnist bwestrope@
hotmail.com

Read Betty's past columns here

It has been a spectacularly beautiful summer if you like 80-90-degree temperatures, brilliant blue skies, and enough sun to freckle an albino.

It has, in fact, been exactly what poet James Russell Lowell must have meant when he wrote, "What is so rare as a day in June?” except that it wasn't just in June, it was in June, July and August and it hasn't been rare at all.

Some might say it's been "well done.” (Grill humor.)

But truthfully, aren't you getting a little sick of it? Perfect weather, day after day, like southern California or Acapulco or Hawaii before the hurricane. No reason to complain. No reason to even discuss it, really, except to say to each other, "It's another beautiful day, isn't it?” and responding wittily, "... Yup!”

No need to watch the Weather Channel; no green spots over Wisconsin. No plausible reason (besides embarrassment) not to squeeze into your bathing suit and dog-paddle in the lake. No excuse to sit indoors with a good book. Worst of all, an uncomfortable, guilty feeling for going shopping.

Meanwhile, it has taken me decades of living in northern Michigan to develop a full complement of bad-weather coping mechanisms and I hadn't had a chance to use one in weeks.

You know what I mean. We people on the 45th parallel are more inwardly comfortable with bad weather. We know what to DO. We complain. We joke. We say, "It's another beautiful day, isn't it?” and then we laugh, because usually that's hysterical.

We feel blessed/cursed by our weather because we're sure no one else has it exactly as bad. Chiefly, it feels familiar, like an old friend who visits often, stays way too long, and doesn't seem to mind being made fun of. We have bad weather, yes, but it's OUR bad weather. And it's BAAAAD.

This good weather (that's another thing bad weather does; it helps one know the difference) belongs somewhere else, someplace where people wake up every morning to the sunny sameness of 70 or 80 degrees and know that it'll be 90 by noon, just as it was the day before and the day before and the day before. We, on the other hand, are accustomed to going to bed not knowing what we'll wake up to, but being pretty sure that whatever it is, by noon it will be 1) gone or 2) worse.

I guess this whole summer of magnificent weather proves once again our weather's ability to confound us. Of all the prognostications that might have been made for us, weather perfection never hit the radar. But we've had it!

I've had it, too. Mother Nature must have been listening, because we finally got a furious downpour, some cool nights, and a couple days of gloom. Weather constancy of any kind gets on my nerves; three months of perfect summer is, well, undeserved. Uncomfortable, too.

Or maybe that's just swimmer's itch.

Contact Betty Werth by e-mail at bwestrope@hotmail.com.