A Theory of Relativity ...

Back in October, just a few short months after our arrival in the notoriously chilly interior, I wrote a little speculation on temperature and altitude in our new valley home. To my naive October post, blogger and former Goldstream Valley resident Colorado Columbine responded that once it's been down to forty below, ten below will feel like a heat wave. As the mercury plummeted into winter, quickly surpassing anything I'd ever experienced, we learned a new meaning of cold. But back in October, I didn't believe it a word of it.

Warm southern readers, I Do Now. We have found, true to her experience, that after a few days at thirty below (or several months at twenty below) anything nearing zero sounds tropical. Going outside in boxer shorts and snowboots to get something from the car at ten above is pleasant. Today, with the late cold snap finally (everyone knock on wood ... I'm serious ... do it now) fading into daytime temperatures closer to 25, I took a walk with just a hoodie and jeans - the same thing I was wearing on 60 degree evenings last summer.

Not only do I believe in the power of relative temperature, I have empirical proof, in the form of our notoriously cold-despising desert hound, that the phenomenon is not psychosomatic. In October, with temperatures getting close to 32, she refused to be outside for more time than it took her to do her business and sprint back through the door. And heaven help us if that door wasn't open for her headlong dash back to the heater. This week, with post-Equinox sunlight pouring in and the temperature hovering around 15 degrees, Nyssa demanded to be let out of the house and proceeded to sniff around the porch and yard for twenty minutes without a glance back at the door.

[heater worshipping doggie]

As winter trailed on in the lower 48, friends of mine often caught themselves complaining about their weather, then trailing off awkwardly with a "well, I guess that's not cold to you anymore ..." The thing is, it is still cold to me. I still remember (with a shiver) the bone-chilling ice winds in Chicago, and what a good cold-front in Texas feels like when you are used to eighty degree spring days. Those places remain cold in my memory, even though I've ticked off -40 on my been-there-done-that list (expecting worse, thanks Global Warming.) In the end, I'll take the deep, dry, dead-still cold of this interior winter to the damp, numbing gale funneled through Chicago's skyscrapers any day, no matter what the thermometer says.