It was 45 degrees here today. People peeled off their long underwear to reveal pasty legs, and they went outside to blink at that thing in the sky-- was it the sun?
There were girls on rooftops sunbathing. The old women and men from the neighborhood gathered on the corner down there to chat. By 4:00 they were performing a beautifully coreographed rendition of "Having a Heat Wave" in Russian. Traffic was tied up for a few minutes, as, of course, such musical theatre numbers must of necessity take place in the street.
And I knew that my acclimation to New England was complete when I uttered the words "it won't last."
And indeed it won't. By nightfall The Weather Channel announced that colder air and possible snow would settle in again by Wednesday.

I can't believe I'm actually sitting here worried that I might have to move away from all this loveliness.
I grew up in the South, though, and in the South 45 degrees means we put ON the long underwear and stay inside. We don't do musical numbers in the street until it reaches at least 60 degrees, and then it's just easier to sit on the porch with a glass of sweettea and count the cars that pass by.

To grow up in the South is to grow up knowing that Yankees are surly, selfish, and almost entirely lacking in social graces of any kind. Having lived through three New England winters, I can say with certainty that Yankees are not rude-- they're just COLD. I don't mean cold in some metaphorical sense. It's hard to be friendly when you haven't been able to feel your own feet since October. It's hard to be optimistic when you haven't seen the sun in a month and grass in almost three. I see the nightly forecast and marvel that this country ever got founded. Only a group as joyless as the Puritans could have come to Massachusetts in November and thought "yeah, this looks like a nice enough place." It leads me to wonder how the face of global politics might be different right now if the weather was just a little nicer in New England.