By Vincent Safuto staff writer
November 1, 2003
Once a year, I try to make an excursion to New York City to see the family and relatives I left behind when I decided to make Florida my home.
On my latest visit, something amazing happened. It snowed.
Granted, I wasn't in New York City, but up in the Catskill Mountains to see my youngest brother get married, but it was quite a thrill the day after the wedding to see a snowfall.
The day hadn't so much dawned as the night got less dark. Our inn on the mountain was in the middle of a cloud, and someone reported that it was raining outside.
Several minutes later, someone else said, "Look. It's snowing."
White stuff was falling, and soon it started to "stick." Eventually cars, railings and other items had a dusting of wet slushy snow. For someone who hadn't seen snow in 16 years, though, the details didn't matter. What was falling was white, flaky and sticking to the ground. It was snow.
When you've been in Florida for several years, you miss the snow. If only, you wonder, we could have more than a few random flakes every couple of years.
Sure, a snow machine could make snow for kids to play in, but wouldn't real snow be better? As always, though, there's a catch. In order to have snow instead of dreary drizzles and gray skies, you need not only conditions right for precipitation but also cold air.
The trouble is that there's a great chasm of difference between the Northerner's and the Southerner's definition of warm and cold when it comes to outside air temperature. Get up on a morning in Vero Beach when the temperature is in the 50s, and you're racing for the thermostat to turn on the heat and howling that you're freezing.
A Northerner, meanwhile, is stripping off clothes and opening windows, and glorying in a "warm" day.
It's true. When Northerners visit us they think it's great when we have days in the 50s and 60s, while the low 70s causes us to break out the cold-weather gear and anything below 70 has us bundled up in winter coats and wishing it would get "warm" at least our definition of warm again.
Visitors from Northern climes find our summers to be unbearably hot, though, and what is a normal summer day for us is a heat wave for them.
Likewise, their "brisk" fall days can be so cold, you think your skin will freeze and your ears will break off. And that's the price I had to pay for experiencing snow. Years of Florida have thinned out my New York blood and I know that if I were to experience real snow, I'd need to be in a space suit to avoid freezing to death.
Still, snow is snow, and maybe next time I'll go on vacation somewhere where it falls regularly, pack the long johns and maybe even try skiing. Anything to see the white stuff hit the ground again, and stick.
Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at ( Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).
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