Recently in line at my local grocery store, I overheard the couple in front of me laughing because most everyone was wearing jackets and it was only 65 degrees outside. “These people don’t know what real cold is!” the gentleman bragged. I’m sure if he had turned around he would have gotten a chuckle at the UGG boots on my feet and the knitted scarf wound around my neck. Well sir, I may not know what real cold is, but I do know heat. And I know humidity. It’s those two factors that contribute to most Floridians donning sweaters as soon as the temps dip below 70°. Something I’m sure my fellow mocking customer had no real experience with.
Every year in mid-January every person in the North (the North is how southerners describe any other region in the country besides the South) declares that this will be their last winter because they are moving to the Florida. In Florida you don’t have blizzards, you don’t have to shovel your driveway and you don’t have to salt anything other than the rim of your margarita glass. A lot of people make good on their threat and actually make the move – usually in the fall just before school starts. At first, they love it! The gentle waves of temperature highs and lows throughout the fall and winter and spring make for a welcome change from months of freezing weather. It gets warm, it gets cool. It’s cold and then it’s balmy. Then right around Mother’s Day – kablam – it gets hot, really hot. And it stays that way. No more cool nights and warm days. The humidity begins to move in right around July 4th. This is not your ordinary humidity. This is southern humidity. Humidity that coats your skin and weights you down the moment you walk outside. It suffocates your pores and forces your lungs to work twice as hard. It saps your physical strength and causes your hair to double in volume and stand on end. The shorts and t-shirts you’ve been wearing since the end of March now feel like a snowsuit. Just when you think it couldn’t possibly get any hotter, July turns into August. August is the month that separates the true southerners from the wannabes.
August is the reason retirees are glad they get to escape back to their northern homes after Easter. August is when many newcomers realize that they didn’t move to a warmer climate; they moved to a tropical one. The daily afternoon thunderstorms make the heat and humidity feel worse instead of cooling off the atmosphere. Add in a few hurricanes and the inevitable wildfires and many northerners run, not walk, to the state line and keep on going. But those brave souls who stick it out eventually get rewarded sometime in November with a cool western breeze and a few nights when you can turn off the air conditioner and sleep with opened windows. Finally, you can actually run a brush through your hair! The sun warms your skin instead of blistering it in seconds. You start to get excited about highs of only 80°. By the time our southern winter rolls around, you have dug out your sweaters and stocked up on firewood. You wait impatiently for the weatherman to tell you that the low will be in the mid-forties. Then you are just as impatient after a couple of days for the thermometer to rise again. It always does.
The man in the grocery store was right; I don’t know what real cold is. I’ve never had to dig out my car from a snowdrift or worry about the high cost of heating oil. I’m sure he would have been baffled at my warm layers since he was wearing golf shorts had he just turned around. I’m also sure that once his vacation was over he went back North and is complaining right now about his real cold and making plans to return to the Sunshine State on a more permanent basis. No sir, I don’t know real cold but I’m pretty sure you don’t know real heat and real humidity. Or that palmetto bugs fly!