By Elizabeth Prata
January in Maine, where I used to live, January in Georgia where I live now.
In Maine, you close down, button up, seal yourself in for the winter. I mean literally- we had to put towels in front of the bottom of the door to stop the cold air from coming in, and put plastic over the windows. At one point the snow was blowing so hard it snuck in UNDER the door and piled up in the corner.
Oh, there are people who do outside things, snowmobile/ski/ice fish. Not me, I enjoyed the summer things of flowers and birds and swimming in the lake. But the land is frozen and barren- very still with no birds, nothing green, and it’s dark. A struggle to simply live, because of constant shoveling snow and trying to drive in it. It felt like life went into suspended animation, with cryogenics and daily danger.
I love that the outdoors in January in GA is still dynamic: birds singing and flying around, ducks and geese quacking in the non-iced pond across the street, flowers hang on late into the year and grass is still green in places.
Mainly, I’m glad you don’t take your life in your hands when you go outside. Frostbite, slipping on ice and breaking a hip or your head, car sliding off the roads, someone else sliding into you, having to shovel the snow just so you can walk out of your house or get the car out from under. That hump is my car. We had gone to Florida for 2 weeks and when we returned there had been some successive snowstorms, and this was the result.
The snow plows come by and push the snow off the road, and in so doing it makes a snowdrift across your driveway so you have to shovel that too.
Snowplows are big and so are the plow blades-
And don’t forget to shovel around the mailbox. USPS will not deliver if they can’t reach the mailbox from the car.
If you don’t shovel, the mailbox just gets buried from successive sweeps of the snowplow.
I am grateful to have been able to go “where the weather suits my clothes”. I am going on year 18 years, and this is the first winter I wore a sweater with a turtleneck. But as January progresses and we hit February the threat of under freezing temps passes. Average temperatures for our county in February are 58 for a high and 35 for a low. In my old county the average high in February is near the low in Georgia, 33 degrees, and the average low in Maine then is 16 degrees. As March comes to Georgia, lots and lots of flowers and flowering trees, with average temps 65 for a high and 41 for a low.
I really appreciate the gentler weather here. Granted, summer is hot but not as unbearably cold as it is in ME in the winter, nor for as long! My southern friend would gasp and laugh when I tell them the average high temp in my old county in Maine was 79 degrees in July & August.
Enjoy where you are and if you don’t enjoy where you are make the most of it without complaint. I remind myself not to complain about the heat in a Georgia Summer. The humidity is worse!
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