Winter is Back

While I was out walking our big dog Rodney last week, one of our neighbors emerged from her house, spread her arms wide, turned a broad smile to the heavens and happily proclaimed, “We’re having a heat wave!”

She was exaggerating, of course. With temperatures in the 40s, it was still fairly cool outside, but I wasn’t going to quibble with her. The East Coast was just coming off a deep freeze that saw iguanas go catatonic in Florida and sent wind chills well below zero in parts of New England. It was so cold where we live in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle, taking Rodney for his customary spin around the neighborhood was daunting. My wife bundled up so much, you could only see the whites of her eyes. So yes, it was noticeably warmer — a heat wave, even, by comparison.

By Thursday, it was even more balmy. Highs topped 60 degrees in my neighborhood and rose even higher on Friday — a fact that did not go unremarked upon. While I was taking our daughter to school Friday morning, she said “it feels like springtime in January!” She was not wrong. I half-expected to see confused daffodils begin poking out of the ground.

The oddball weather gave the guys in sturdy leather work boots (the kind I wear for show) renewed vigor. They shut down the road in the lower part of the neighborhood and had the backhoes and shovels out, again — cleaning up from the New Year’s Day water main break and making some upgrades on the water line aimed at keeping another break at bay, or at least making the next one not quite as catastrophic.