The weather here in the late winter / early spring of the Deep South is weird. Over the past week, every day has been different from the last. Today it’s chilly, damp — intermittent rain showers — and gray. Yesterday it was warm, sunshiny and dry. The day before that, it was gusty, cold, and clouds were blowing over at periodic intervals, and I could go on from there. I guess it’s not unlike the normal “March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb” weather that you talk about at more northerly latitudes… spring comes in early in this part of the world.
It makes it strange, though, to read about the real winter storms that are sweeping other parts of the nation as I deal with thunderstorms, sometimes severe ones with tornado warnings attached (over the weekend the warning sirens were sounding one evening, though it turned out that the tornadoes they’d seen weren’t in our direct vicinity), but not snowstorms and all the attached scary driving issues.
It’ll have been three years — or is it two? — since I’ve seen a real winter, in my last year in Ohio. I guess two years (05-06), now that I think about it. It’s funny what a hole that six months in Baghdad makes in my timeline… I constantly find myself referring to something that happened “last year”, only to realize that it was before I deployed, which makes it two years ago, or almost that. I’m actually almost up for my time to get a new cell phone for Verizon, and yet it feels like I’ve barely had mine for a year. Well, for the amount of time that I had it, I guess it really has been just a year, maybe a little more. I took it with me but only pulled it out of the bag where it slumbered under my bed once, because they don’t have Verizon-compatible service in Baghdad (yet). Besides, I’d forgotten to bring the charger with me and I knew that when I came home I’d want to make some calls from the airport. Which I eventually did, and almost ran the battery of my phone dry. Next time, I’ll take the charger, even if it’s only so that I can charge the phone in the airport on my way back!
Winter in Baghdad was weird, too, mainly because it was so short. We had about a month of chilly weather, about two week of rains, and then it started warming up in mid-February (just about this time of year). By March, it was almost too hot to comfortably sit outside at midday, and when I was outside, I was getting sunburns (gotta love the pale complexion of my northern European ancestors…). Although when I compared notes with my Arizona-residing parents, it turned out that our desert climates were remarkably similar. Who knew that the erstwhile Fertile Crescent had so much in common with the land of the saguaros?
I like winter. It wars with autumn to be my favorite season. I like chilly weather, I even like gray days (which is weird, I know, but maybe it’s because I spent many of my formative years in the Pacific Northwest and they seem normal to me). I miss winter badly when I’m living in warmer places. Especially when I’m living in warm places where the sun never stops shining… I miss snow (though whenever I return to a place where snow is more of a constant, I’m going to make sure I’ve got a car that can handle it — and a garage that will keep me from the bulk of the shoveling).
Posted by Kjirstin 
