Attic Salt for Feb. 5, 2012
Nature offers warnings of coming cold
Southerners love a cold weather alert.
An overnight prediction of “upper 20s” sends us into the kind of panic you might expect at the South Pole when the airplane carrying heating fuel is grounded in New Zealand.
Despite predictions of mid- to upper 20s a half dozen times this winter, I’ve still got flowering impatiens in pots in the courtyard.
We waited so long this year to bring in tropical plants, they must have toughened up because they survived some pretty chilly nights.
But we will have our little thrills before the television set as the weather person prepares us for arctic winter (followed by daytime highs in the upper 70s).
My primary source of weather information is a small cube radio purchased years ago and still picking up signals from the National Weather Service.
I depress the bar that activates the radio and go about my business within listening range of the radio. I’m curious about the part of the broadcast that gives the outlook for the next 48 hours but must listen to long minutes of, to me, irrelevant information.
Why, I wonder, can’t the National Weather Service broadcast on two frequencies, one carrying the full broadcast, which includes the marine forecast, and one carrying just the local weather?
I’ve come to rely on more accurate predictions of changes in the weather.
If I awaken with a splitting headache after days of overcast skies, I know we’re due a high pressure system and blue skies.
It’s terrible, but I’ve come to associate gorgeous winter days with stabbing pain behind my eyes.
If the cat suddenly decides to sleep at the foot of our bed, I know a cold night’s coming. We keep the heat turned low at our house.
If the fish in the fountain in the courtyard don’t show up for breakfast and dinner, I know cold weather’s coming. During a stretch of cold days last year, I didn’t see the fish for three days. Then, they reappeared, as though answering the dinner bell, along with warmer weather.
If cold weather’s coming, the birds visit our three feeders as though they’ve received a “Calling All Birds” radio message.
A cardinal is an exception. This bird eats and eats no matter what the weather. The cardinal, a male, is close to being perfectly round.
No matter what the calendar says, it’s not winter at our house until we bring in the plants. We’ve read that indoor plants add to the oxygen level in the house.
You couldn’t prove it by me. I get just as many colds. My thinking doesn’t seem any sharper. If there’s extra oxygen in my house, it doesn’t help me find my car keys or the bicycle pump or the flashlight that’s supposed to be in the secretary top in the living room.
Once we’ve brought in the tropicals that live outside most of the year, the house becomes an indoor forest.
While I’m sitting up late at night reading, the house is so quiet that when a leaf falls from the ficus there is almost the sound of a crash as the leaf strikes the quarry tile floor.
I think: Winter.