“This is the coldest month I have ever recorded,” Jason Bauserman was telling me as we conversed at the green boxes in Bartow on December 31. “Period?” I asked amazed. “Yes. January of 1994 had colder days, but it also had warmer days and it averaged out warmer than this December.”
So there you have it. December of 2010 was cold. Every day. Beginning December 1, upon a substantial snow fall that mostly continued through the month.
That explains a lot.
I hadn’t really given the matter much thought. I mean, as I made my way through the month, with all the doings of the days, it didn’t seem extraordinary. Not at the time. But then again, ask the slow-boiled frog if he noticed anything different.
It was yesterday, January 1, 2011, when I began to take notice. I started to understand that 2010 went out in a kind of boiled-frog-in-reverse slow freeze. Because yesterday it rained. And thawed. And did the kinds of things that are in direct contrast to what this December personified.
What did December do?
I am no weatherman, so you’d better ask Jason to be sure. But. It seems to me. That January 1, 2011, was the foggiest day I have ever, well, recorded. And it might just have been. All that snow, frozen for an entire glacial December, brought to fast heat. Add that rain, and bam! Instant John Carpenter’s 1980 film “The Fog.”
Looking out my kitchen window, I could see whole Angus cattle in the very near foreground, followed by fog-piercing cow parts a bit farther out—a leg below fog, a head above. And just a bit farther than that, nothing but that fog. I rightly expected ghostly diving-gear-clad revenge-seeking lepers to emerge en route to me. I felt it best to stay inside and hide. What a weather-weird start to the new year!
Today, this morning, it is the second day of 2011. And the vista from my kitchen window is the frog jumped from the pan! Leaning spires of remnant cloud gasping their last in the snuck-up-on-’em sun! Back Allegheny Mountain, beyond the Greenbrier River, is the backdrop for the albino-feathered wisps. The Observatory a kind of what-happened-here understory for the expanse of pausing pseudo smoke.
And so I understand what this December did. And therefore what this December cannot do further. This December can no longer be subtle. She is found out, Her freezing way of boiling the mind, Her long method in seduceful subduction of pace and perception. And while She was truly beautiful—the most such ever recorded—She has given way to a new year. She had to. To a new beginning, to the promise of January.
Today, not yesterday, is the start proper to my new year.
