Good, ‘ole Florida. Where the cold snaps come, and the cold snaps go. In the blink of a day.
One morning it dips down to a mind-numbing 28 degrees – cold enough to cause Floridians to fall out of trees – and by afternoon it’s already climbing into the 60s with bright, warming sun filling the land.
Florida, you’re so schizophrenic.
My wife’s relatives from Long Island own a diner and sent pictures of what looked like Mt. Everest from the winter storm that hit them. It was the snow they shoveled at 4 a.m. from the sidewalk in front of the restaurant.
“Oh!” we thought. “Let’s send them a picture of our bird bath. It completely froze through this morning!” They texted back, “OMG! Are you all OK? You Floridians don’t know how to deal with extreme temperatures. We hear you fall out of trees!”
And we wrote back, “No, don’t worry. The ice already melted. We’re going to the beach.”
Which is one of the many reasons why people hate us.
Because, yeah, here in Florida, we might get cold snaps, but it doesn’t linger long. You have to keep taking your allergy medicine through the whole endeavor because the pollen doesn’t stop falling. What kind of state freezes and turns your car yellow in the same day? Everyone else is dreaming of spring, and we’ve already had three, and a day that felt like summer.
But we sure struggle when it turns cold.
Here in the Sunshine State, weather officials tell South Floridians to cover their tree-dwelling iguanas when the temperatures dip. This invasive species doesn’t do well in the chills. Their little systems get so stunned that they fall into some kind of suspended animation. In this state, they forget everything they ever learned about gravity or the need to hold onto tree branches. And just like that, they plumet out of their trees. The rate of concussions caused by falling iguanas leads the nation in Miami. As for the critters themselves, as soon as it warms up, they climb back into the trees and wonder what they drank the night before.
It’s not just our reptiles. All Floridians fall into the cold-weather stupors. Like trances. We become slow and lethargic. Moreso than usual. We’re pretty slow even on the hottest of days. But in the cold, we walk around like chilly, teeth-chattering zombies. We moan about the cold. Get disoriented. Ask random people, “Do you know why it’s so chilly? Do you know when it’s gonna’ end? Do you know where I live … or how to zip up my jacket? I’ve never worn it before.”
Even the animals don’t want to go outside. My dog calls for Ubers to take her around the block for a morning pee.
We don’t know how to manage. How to cope. We get confused. Bewildered. Like when we walk down our front porch steps and we notice they’re slippery. Slippery?!? Well, this makes no sense. So, we trudge up and down them over and over until the – it’s ice, Floridian! – launches us into the lawn beside the stunned neighborhood iguana.
Or how we try to drive with frosty, iced-over windshields. We have no idea how to cope with this. We try the windshield wipers, but they just skitter over it like fingernails on a chalkboard. We have never used the defroster in our life, so we don’t bother with that. The best we can come up with is to drive with our heads stuck out the window until our eyes are frost-bit.
We’re a state where we take “layer-up” so seriously that we put on every warm object we own. We look like the little brother in “A Christmas Story” who can’t put his arms down. We look like cold-weather mummies. Encased in so many shirts and sweaters and jackets and pairs of underwear that the entire state stumbles around ping-ponging into each other. “Do you know where I live?” we mumble. “Do you know how to zip up my jacket? Do you know why I can’t feel anything in my lower extremities?!?”
And then, mercifully and to the answer of all our prayers, it warms up later that day. The sun comes out, and we start to thaw. We pick our iguanas up and put them back in the trees. We pile all of our sweaters into plastic containers and stuff them in the attic for next year. We walk our shivering dogs to relieve their bulging bladders, and we go back to being Floridians. Basking in the sun and taking our allergy medicine for the unrelenting blizzard of pollen. With our multiple pairs of gloves off, we can finally respond to family and friends up north that we’re OK.
“All good,” we reply. “Fell out of the tree once, but feeling much better now. Going to the beach later … when it cools down a bit.”