Around our parts it’s been a mild winter.  Not much snow, some pretty cold nights but always rebounding during the day.  At then, on February 2, Punxsutawney Phil called for 6 more weeks of winter.  “Six more?” people questioned, “We haven’t seen 6 yet.”

Be careful who you tick off.  Since then we’ve had lows in the teens, wind chills on the other side of zero, and snow enough to break out the snow-blower without fear of ridicule form the neighborhood distributor of testosterone.

There’s something about cold weather that we don’t understand.  It seems to encourage some people to dress as inappropriately as one possibly can.  Everybody in a cold weather climate has managed to run across the one mucho-macho sort who feels that cold weather is no reason for him to deviate from his usual wardrobe of shorts and work boots.  But we’re not talking about him.  Truth be told, we’d prefer not to even think about him.  No, there are others out there who have had the logic portion of their brains suffer from an unexpected frost.

Last Friday night we were waiting for a table at a local restaurant.  Regular readers know we don’t wait long for food.  If we’re told it will be anything longer than a 15 minute wait we consider how much we really want to eat from that menu that evening.  So the fact that we were waiting for a table tells you that we weren’t there long.  Yet in the few minutes that we were standing off to the side of the hostess stand we saw a couple come in that bore watching.  For frostbite.  One-half of the two was wearing a sweatshirt.  The other half, just a shirt shirt.  Did we mention that the outdoor temperature displayed on our dash was 26 degrees, that the snow was wet and cold when it fell, and that where there was not salt there was ice when we parked in the same lot they just came in from? 

The next morning after the temperature dropped another 10 degrees and the sky dropped another 2 inches of snow we were driving through the parking lot of one of the nearby shopping centers and had stopped at a crosswalk while a young man walked by wearing an open hoodie.  Six storefronts down at another crosswalk we paused while another man crossed the other way wearing a football jersey while holding hands with a pre-school version of himself who was wearing a leather jacket bearing the same football team’s logo.  Inside the stores we saw as many wind breakers, sweaters, and an occasional scarf over a light jacket as we did hats, gloves, and toasty wool coats.   This all came after we dropped off She of We’s car for service where a young lady sat in the customer’s lounge wearing only a short raincoat.

Perhaps we unnecessarily marvel at the way some people dress.  Yes, it was only 16 degrees but that was outside.  Inside the stores and restaurants and garages the temperatures were in a well-controlled 68 to 72 degree range.  Yes, outside the snow had fallen and some squalls continued to pass through.  But that was outside.  All of the merchants’ roofs were intact, their insides were dry, and not even fake snow covered any displays. 

And it’s not like we walk to many stores any more.  We don’t ride in open carriages or on run in on horseback.  We get to them in our heated cars with our temperature specific climate systems sitting in our heated seats and holding onto our heated steering wheels.  But boy we still feel bad when we see the abandoned car on the side of the road with its flashers blinking on and off, and hope they didn’t have to wait long for help in this weather.

And if they did, we hope they weren’t cold while they waited.

Now, that’s what we think.  Really.  How ‘bout you?