Guess I will have to quit bragging about our nice weather lately. Mother Nature sure turned the tables on us Monday morning. If it wasn’t past the middle of April, I would have said we were hit with a real April Fool’s joke this time.
We were sure spoiled with a taste of summer so early in the season. Surprise, it isn’t summertime yet!
Beautiful sunshine and 82 degrees last week (break out some shorts and lose the coats), followed by a slight drop into upper 70s next, then fifties. Woops, don’t put the winter coat away yet. Suddenly there’s snow coming down and temps back down in the 20s and 30s. Must be Michigan, right? Our thermometer only says 36 degrees and it’s close to noon. And, the furnace is running again…
Today is Tuesday
I suppose we have to expect this sort of thing this time of year. Looking back through some old columns for inspiration I saw one from mid-April in 2014 that said:
Saturday night we had a real thunder-buster, complete with a downpour of nearly five inches of rain over a 24-hour period, leading to the worst flooding in the area since 1986, and complete with road damage, a ferocious windstorm that took out buildings and trees and just as a little frosting on the cake, we ended up with a couple inches of snow and icy roads to contend with.
And it’s only Tuesday.
So, I guess we shouldn’t complain too much…those brief days of July weather were just a fluke – a pretty regular one too. We sure have some strange spring weather here in mid-Michigan…but I guess that’s not really surprising living on a peninsula surrounded by some of the biggest fresh water lakes in the world.
It doesn’t matter much to me, especially when I’m here in the office pretty much all day on Tuesdays and Wednesdays – and sometimes Monday and Thursday too.
Speaking of 1986, that was a “once-every-fifty-years” event. We were living on the banks of the Tobacco, our second year there and we got a real taste of the havoc Mother Nature could come up with.
In the first week of September, we were not only an island in the river, our place looked like a houseboat – with a lot of leaks.
That time we got nine inches of rain in just 12 hours. The river came up and up until we began to wonder if our house would soon be headed downstream with the rest of the debris. It not only came inside; we had nine inches of water in my ground level office and in our garage. You haven’t experienced a real weather event until you see a canoe floating around in your garage.
Those days are long-gone now. Home is now here in our “big camper” on Whiteville and the river is a long way from here – a real relief to the guy I live with. I loved living on the river, but he absolutely hated the flooding we put up with periodically at our old place out east of Clare.
Here it is only the “Chicago” winds we have to put up with, which sometimes rattle the awning over the front door so hard you’d swear it was blowing away. Example? The flag on our flagpole out front is ragged from the wind – and it isn’t even a year old yet. The first flag shredded within about six months…time to buy another, I guess.
There’s always something, isn’t there?
Although it’s often windy here, I have to admit we do have quite a view. With windows south, east and west, it is a bright and cheery living room that gives us great sunrises and sunsets all the time.
I will always miss those years on the banks of the Tobacco, but I am adjusting to the changes and looking forward to the addition of a bit more space in the form of an entry/pantry/closet at the back door and a three-season “porch” addition on the south west side (which we are saving our pennies for).
We always find something to look forward to.