Coming back to Houston from Nashville in 1984, and getting to stay forever, or so it seemed at the time, was a dream come true.
There were things I loved about Nashville, and still do. The seasons. The forests in the Warner parks and Radnor Lake, which was effectively my back yard from 1979-84. South Nashville at the time had no fences, so free-range kids had even more range than most, and when I was not in school, I wore no shoes between early March and the first snow. Come October, I'd have thick natural pads on the bottoms of my feet, natural rawhide so thick I could walk all day with small thorns embedded in that Nova leather and not even notice until I was in the tub.
Fall is what I miss the most about living up there -- the colors, the piles of big leaves, the smell of smoke in the air -- both from fireplaces and people burning leaves in their yards.
But I digress...
All of that lovely stuff about Nashville weather is pretty much nullified by there winters there. They really, really drag you down. No, it's not Minnesota cold or Buffalo snowy: It's worse. It's a 40 degree day for months on end.
If you've ever watched The Wire, you know what Stringer Bell said about 40 degree days.
Dissatisfied with the lackluster street sales of his army of heroin dealers, Bell had this to say:
"That's like a 40-degree day. Ain't nobody got nothing to say about a 40-degree day. Fifty. Bring a smile to your face. Sixty, shit, n***** is damn near barbecuing on that motherfucker. Go down to 20, n****** get their bitch on. Get their blood complaining. But forty? Nobody give a fuck about 40. Nobody remember 40, and y'all n***** is giving me way too many 40-degree days! What the fuck?"
That's a Nashville winter. A dismal carnival of yellow grass, gray skies, and bare trees. An endless procession of dry air and 40 degree days. It snows once, or maybe twice, so you don't get the excitement of a blizzard all that often. And yet the car's door handles shock you every time you touch them. Your sinuses dry up. Some people erupt with violent nosebleeds. It sucks, and it is majorly depressing. I mean that in the clinical sense.
So when I was dividing time between the two cities, Houston was always like Prozac to me. Reliable. Calm. I've always thought the transplanted northerners here whining about the lack of winter were fools.
After all, there is always a cure for that malaise: that road we now call Interstate 45. Get in your car, enter that freeway, and head north. It merges with 35 north of Dallas, and from there, you can take it all the way to beautiful, cosmopolitan Salina, Kansas.
Daily mean temps for the winter months in Salina hover around the freezing point. If that's not enough to slake your thirst for a "real winter," just keep heading north through Nebraska and the Dakotas and up to the Canadian tundra.
And then turn back around when that real winter you've been longing for sends you scuttling back down here. There's a reason every backroad in Brazoria County and all points south of here in Texas and all the other states are chock-a-block with RV parks full of trailers with plates from Kansas and Nebraska and the Dakotas and Minnesota and Iowa and so on and that reason is that life in those states in the wintertime is unrelenting misery.
Sure, our winter weather is tedious, even if on the rare occasions it does get down below 40 here, it feels colder than Nashville at around ten degrees. I've experienced this first hand -- one day I woke in Nashville on a day that cold and was comfortable enough in a short sleeve polo and Mork from Ork parka vest. I flew down to Houston on a windy frigid blanket day with a high of about 38 and the same attire was woefully inadequate. I've seen the theory that cold humid feels no colder than cold dry, but my own experience negates that claim.
Yes, I'd love a Gulf Coast snowfall more than once every decade or two. But while Ii's boring, but you could have it worse. You don't have to deal with Nashville's four-month-long melancholy of gray skies, bare trees and yellowed grass, nor shoveling three feet of snow off your stoop in Erie or Duluth. Only rarely will your car door handle shock you.
So Happy Gulf Coast Winter, Y'all.
Yeah, I'll take a Gulf Coast winter most any day over being atop the smoky mountains. I, too, like the change in seasons but not that much. On the other hand, I've seen a few summers around here where those triple digits AND humidity seem to last forever. The semi-tropical rains do help and that's why it is always about ten degrees milder on the Island. One thing that I would bet on is that other states would not put up with the Texas power grid having experienced last February and with little assurance that anything has really been done about it.