Lean in y’all. I don’t want the enemy to hear us. And it’s out there – all around us.
Since all of you grew up here, I don’t think you’ve been paying attention, but I, as an outside observer of only 13½ years have noticed something important that I want to whisper to you now. It’s the only conspiracy theory I acknowledge.
Hey: The weather is trying to kill you. It doesn’t want you here.
Look: Back in late autumn when you weren’t expecting it, the Weather whacked you with a snowstorm in early November. It lured you in over the last many years, holding off until December. Holding off until December. Holding off — ready boys? WHOMP! November 2018. Big snowstorm.
And then? Just when you were good and heated up? It quit snowing. No more snow all the way through December. You know why? It’s gaslighting you. It wants to make you look crazy – especially to your out-of-town friends who listened to all your White-Christmas tales. Uh huh. We’re going back home.
“No really!” you said. “Look! It’s 20 degrees! It’s December! Precipitation is coming!” And what it did do on the Solstice, the longest night of the year that screams “WINTER” like no other? It got warm and rained. And then it did that over and over, throughout December. Cold, cold, cold, warm rain. Then cold . . .
UNTIL! Three days ago, up here in Ashfield the weather suddenly dropped to 4 degrees below zero and the wind kicked in the door with a wind chill of 35 degrees below zero! Frostbite after 10 minutes! “Stay out here for 11 minutes trying to clean off your car and I’ll just plain exterminate you!” the Weather said while it dropped a sudden 11 feet of snow right in front of your door so you couldn’t get out. (Maybe it wasn’t 11 feet, but it was close!)
So then we thought, “Snow! Wind! Cold! It’s finally winter!” And we pushed all the cats off the couch so we could sit down by the fire and what happens next? That 35 degrees below zero inverts itself to 53 degrees ABOVE zero with sudden rain like we ain’t seen since Noah! Rain all over the snow, melting it into cold, rushing rivers that gave way to “Flood Warning!” reports over as many counties as you could find in the Northeast!
And then, ERK! Boom! Back to 20 degrees so that when you went to visit friends in Heath, trudging through the mud to get to their front door, you thought you were safe until you went outside two hours later and found ICE! Mastodons! Saber tooth tigers and penguins! Roaming around, tripping you while you tried to crawl back to your car over the ice and then, when you opened your car door the wind shoved it open and leaned on it so that you thought it was either going to fly off, or stay at a 90 degree angle for the rest of all time! (And let a mastodon climb in your lap!) Is this a country that wants your comfort-seeking butt in it? I don’t think so.
I should like to mention that all of this came after a summer where I, an authentic southerner finally felt real heat up here. For 13½ years I’ve been waiting for summer, and last July, I finally found it. I was so happy. But, the Weather, see, it thought it was going to be able to chase you away with that heat. But you didn’t go. You stayed! So, it realized it needed to get tougher. And, it did last Wednesday.
Now. We have these spies called “weather reporters” who are supposed to go and infiltrate to find out what the weather is up to, but I think they’re being paid off by the Weather to mislead us so that we dress wrong, which makes all of this even more suspicious.
You don’t believe me? Okay, I have one more tale to tell you about what they are up to. A few weeks ago, I was walking down the street, successfully avoiding every single patch of invisible ice the Weather had put out there to trick me into breaking my shoulder, when, what did I see, there, on the ice, plain as day? A banana peel. See? Couldn’t get me with the ice? The oldest trick in the book.
I’m telling you — get out now!