What
is it about temperatures that allows a thermometer to read the
same and yet our reactions are extremely different?
I’m
not asking about scenarios where explanations are created and
expanded and offered to make sense of things. This isn’t about
heading into the yard and the sky is clear on one day or overcast
the next. It doesn’t involve sitting in the shade or strong winds.
I
never really buy into these reasons, finding them virtually pointless
for the most part. For while it’s nice to know if it’s going to
rain, the reality is cold is cold and hot is hot. If you get a
forecast where they’re telling you it’s going to reach one hundred
and ten degrees, the additional observations about it being a
dry heat don’t offer consolation as much as a warning about the
chance of wildfires.
A
few years ago, I found myself in Orlando on vacation in December.
The first morning after our arrival, I decided to drive around
the resort, check out the pools and restaurants and other facilities,
and just get familiar with a fairly large property. It was in
the low forties when I got in my car. I had arrived from a location
where each day hovered around freezing as the high of the day.
I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. Everywhere I went on my ride,
staff outside were bundled up and shivering.
It
seems almost too easy to blame all of it on perspective. Hardly
seems fair to summarize it as expectations. Alaska has ice. Residents
of the Florida Keys shop for January clothing needs by picking
up light-weight sweatshirts. But if you remove the wind chill
factors and direct sunlight and whatever influences that create
some it-feels-like situation, the idea remains: one person’s thirty-nine-degrees
is not always another person’s thirty-nine-degrees.
Consider
a run of two weeks where the temperature never tops single-digits.
Overnight, the average low is a negative number. It’s cold. Brutally
cold. If that run ends with a thirty-nine-degree day, people would
head outside dressed for the beach and ready to celebrate.
Now,
think of a place where the average winter temperatures are in
the sixties. The concept of a frost warning is beyond any rational
thought. Hit thirty-nine-degrees here and people are dressed in
multiple layers that feature heavy coats, gloves, scarves and
hats.
All
of us know people that would use a space heater in the office
during the hottest days of the summer. We know people that would
run an air conditioner as snow falls outside. People are strange,
and our individual comforts even stranger. And yet the exceptions
for some tend to allow the average for most to make even more
sense.
This
morning, I opened the front door and stepped outside. I was heading
off on an early walk. It was thirty-nine degrees at the time.
Down the road, a neighbor had his car parked in a place where
the rising sun hadn’t reached it, and he was scraping some ice
off his windshield.
Spring
is more than halfway along its run to summer. The forecast for
the next week has a night that might dip into the twenties. As
the seasons change, there are still surprises (even if they aren’t
all that surprising).
It
was that windshield that got me thinking about how we react to
temperatures. One of the reasons I park my cars a certain way
in the winter months is that often the morning sun will melt the
frost. The trick works even when the thermometers are saying we
never got out of the teens. Just need a bit of sunshine.
When
is thirty-nine degrees not thirty-nine degrees? Turns out, it’s
just about any day when we move two steps to the right and change
our view.
In
the garage I have a decorative snowman for the lawn. The figure
is on a stake, to stand it up and secure in the ground. The stake
has markers on it so you can judge snowfall accumulation amounts.
The middle of the snowman is a round thermometer. Idea is you
can place it in the yard, somewhere in sight of a window, and
get an idea of what’s like outside. Only I wasn’t thinking too
much about where I set it up. Worked great for the snow totals.
It caught the sun perfectly as the day began and often the reality
of twenty-five was showing on the snowman as sixty-four.
Perhaps
it’s all about perspectives and expectations after all. Or more
specifically, when they’re tipped on their side and none of the
situation makes sense. We gather information, prepare ourselves
for actions and reactions, only to discover something completely
different.
All
of that said, grab a jacket if you’re headed out. It’s going to
get chilly when the sun goes down.