Cold Snap

It was gratifying when the local newspaper deemed this week's temperatures worthy of a full page article, and the radio reported that Late-February low records are being matched and broken in some places in the interior. When one is in one's first year in a new climate, everything is normal. You assume that the cold or warm or dry or wet weather is what you should expect next year, and the next, and the next. So when, all week, there were calls for lows from -45 to -50, I didn't blink. I only braced myself for several more years of such mid-winter temperature dives, and spent a moment in thanksgiving for the ever-higher sun that has the power to at least take the edge off the cold in the afternoons. When this happened in January, there wasn't enough sun and the temperatures stayed that low all day, for days on end. Turns out, this late February cold snap isn't usual. It should start warming back up to Zero soon. Whew!