Enotes

I know this: our hot pepper plants aren't enjoying the cool summer we're having in Metro Detroit. But fie on them. The mercury hasn't scraped much past the mid-80s so far, and we're in mid-July. I couldn't be happier. I don't do well with the heat. The pepper plants do, however, and ours have been struggling to bear fruit, but like I said, fie on them. I can buy hot peppers at the market, although there is a charm to growing your own. But if that's the trade off---store-bought hot peppers in exchange for summer days in which I can breathe without an oxygen mask, then I'll take it and run. Normally by now, we would have suffered through oppressive heat, with temps in the high-80s and low-90s, with enough humidity to curl you from hair to toe. But this year? So far, so good. Cool evenings, enabling you to sleep with the windows open, and is there anything better than breathing in fresh night air as you slumber? Pleasant daytime temps, w...

I think one of the most depressing parts of winter is that we spend it cloaked in darkness. It's dark when you wake up to get ready for work. The afternoons are often overcast and everyone has to drive with their headlights on. It's dark when you drive home from work. You can go days without seeing any serious sunlight. In Michigan, you can pretty much put your sunglasses in the drawer in October and not pull them out again until April---if you're lucky. It's like in wintertime, we've all forgotten to pay the light bill. That's why, when you get a day of sunshine in the winter, your eyes hurt. You spend the day squinting. Everyone looks like Robert De Niro in every movie in which he's ever appeared. But there's something called the Winter Solstice, and we actually passed it a few weeks ago---December 21 to be exact. And when you pass the solstice, you're in for longer days, slowly but surely. When I was a kid, I remember folks talking abo...

It's been a long winter, yet it's already mid-March. Such a dichotomy. It's been a winter that most of us would like to forget in Michigan, but it will likely be among the most memorable. And the calendar keeps flipping. It didn't always feel that way. Back in mid-January, which both feels like an eon ago and like yesterday, with Arctic temps and snow slamming us alternately, there seemed to be no light at the end of the tunnel. Depression began to set in at the thought of a bad winter merely getting started. As the pounding continued, with precious few moments of respite, as January turned to February, you felt like a hamster on a wheel---running but getting nowhere. The only objective at that point was survival. Just getting through it. Then, just like that, it's mid-March. Baseball season is just around the corner, which ought to provide hope and a feeling of spring's renewal. But it's hard to feel that with temps in the 20s and the sidewalk...

It doesn't take much to give us Spring Fever in Michigan. It's cold and flu season, but some of us will be coming down with an incurable case of Spring Fever as the temps are expected to hit and surpass 50 degrees on Friday and Saturday. That's all it takes, you know---a day or two of 40+ degree weather to make us think of baseball, Easter and flowers. Get ready to see folks in shorts and flip flops this weekend. I only partially exaggerate. Flip flops, maybe not, but certainly shorts. I have joked with out-of-towners who live in warm weather climates that while they may think of temps in the low-60s as being "cool" this time of year, people in Michigan would be walking around naked if the mercury touched that mark in the dead of winter. Just a day or two, that's all we need, of unseasonable warmth and you can get a new lease on life. Your countenance changes. You become more optimistic. You wonder whether Punxsutawney Phil will need shades and a glass o...

They will tell you that Michigan is still a state of four seasons. Do not believe them. Somehow, sometime---and I haven't been able to pinpoint when it happened---we in Michigan stopped having four seasons and now have two. OK, two-and-a-half---at best. The seasons have also changed names. They are now "bloody hot" and "chilly/damp." Whatever happened to a crisp, fall afternoon? Or a soothing spring day with an air freshener-like aroma all about? Seems all we have now is unseasonable weather; you know, weird, mild winters and blazing hot Septembers. Actually, the word "unseasonable" is probably not even accurate, because as I said, where have the seasons gone? We had 84 degrees in March, which was the tail end of a winter in which I picked up a snow shovel all of three times. I'm not complaining about the lack of snow; far be it. It's just that the human body is very sensitive to temperature changes, and in Michigan those changes ...

I would love fall---or autumn, if you prefer---much more if I was more tolerant of what comes behind it: Old Man Winter. I adore a crisp fall morning, afternoon and evening. I get to enjoy them all because our Jack Russell Terrier demands exercise in the form of several walks per day, so I don't have much of a choice. But it's all good. So I like the smell of someone burning something or another in the distance. I like the colors, of course. On Saturday afternoons, I like knowing that, all over the country, college football games are being played, whether that college has 1,000 students or 50,000. But as I get older I find myself more and more resentful of the Old Man every year from December thru March. I just don't have the patience anymore for the snow and the ice and the hazards they both bring---and I'm including dog walking in there, in addition to driving. Don't tell me that you're safer walking on the sidewalks in winter time than you are sliding around ...

Most snowstorms are like lumbering elephants. It's hard for one to catch you unawares. There's really no such thing as a sudden, unexpected big heaping of snow. You don't get caught in a snow shower, like you can with rain. The skies don't open one afternoon and before you blink, there's two inches of fluff on the ground. No, snowstorms announce their presence ahead of time, like a courteous guest alerting you that he's planning on stopping by in a couple of days. And he'll be knocking, whether you're home or not. Which is a good thing, I suppose. The advanced warning signs give the Chicken Little weather people plenty of opportunities to run screaming down the streets and yelling into the radio microphones, telling us to take cover and to buy provisions---not necessarily in that order. The impending, Great Snowstorm of 2011 is apparently on its way, having announced its intentions as early as Saturday night. I'm not sure how it works. Maybe the chie...

Someone took leave of their senses at Channel 4 back in the day, and I'd love to know who it was. Sonny Eliot owned Detroit weather TV in the 1960s and '70s. He was the first of the goofy weathermen---the kind who just as soon tell a corn pone joke as they would give you the day's temp and humidity. Eliot wove his groaners and homespun wit into his weathercasts seamlessly. His delivery was like a silver ball in a pinball machine on warp drive, bouncing and ricocheting off each town's current condition frenetically. Every couple of minutes Sonny would come up for air and tell us a joke. "It's 42 degrees today in Manchester, where a man made a killing in the stock market---he murdered his broker." Sonny also combined the day's weather into one nonsensical word. "Today it was cloudy and breezy---cleezy kind of weather," Eliot would say as he wrote the new word vertically down the map of Michigan---in chalk. Sonny was still a chalk guy when the o...

I'm about ready to put autumn on a milk carton. "HAVE YOU SEEN ME?" You remember autumn, don't you? Fall? That once-lovely season wedged between summer and winter, like a crutch that we know can't possibly last but we're happy to use it as long as we can, anyway. Fall---with its once-crisp, sunny days and crunchy leaves beneath your feet, the subtle smell of someone burning them, not too far away. Fall---when you get into your car after it's been under the sun and turn on the A/C, only to have to turn the heat on the next morning when you hop in. What's all this about global warming? And who is the bloody Brit who moved here and brought his weather along with him? Or maybe the invader came from our left flank, from Seattle. Maybe a Starbucks wonk? Regardless, this is the worst fall on record in Michigan, nudging out last year's, which surpassed the year's prior to that. In fact, where have any of our seasons gone? We used to have four of them i...