A lesson from Lot's wife

If it was warm in Sodom and Gomorrah, and we had to move someplace cold, I might have a hard time not looking back, too.

Before moving here, most of my knowledge of the upper midwest was limited to what I learned from Garrison Keillor. He paints a picture of Lutherans in Minnesota that, to some degree, prepared me for life in Wisconsin every week on his NPR show. Let me digress for a minute by saying that I know how it sounds when I begin a sentence with, "I heard something on NPR..." and how it is socially stigmatic. But I don't drive a Volvo and I don't have any bumper stickers and I color my gray hair, so I have hope that I won't be judged too harshly for my polite conversation starters.

Anyway, one of the things I learned about this part of the country is that you shouldn't enjoy anything too much because you will be punished for it. Case in point:

We have had only two days with temperatures above 73 so far this year. Both have occurred on a Sunday and both have started out as completely lovely days. When the weather warms up, people come out of their houses. You discover that the widow across the street had open-heart surgery and shingles over the winter and that the woman around the corner had a baby (she was pregnant??) When it is so cold for so long, it is actually possible to forget that you have neighbors. Those other houses? Yeah, they only block the wind on certain days. So neighbors are visiting, people are smiling for the first time since Super Bowl Sunday, and children are squinting in the sunlight of which they have been deprived for seven months. It is a glorious day when the weather turns warm.

Until about 3:00.

Then the clouds start rolling in.

Then the thunder starts. It always comes first.

Then the flashes of lightning.

And then come the sirens. When a tornado is spotted, the sirens always come on. But I'm not sure who is supposed to be spotting the funnel clouds. It might be children. The same ones who think they see bears on camping trips and can find the tiniest pieces of onion in the soup. We're supposed to heed the warning and retreat to the basement ASAP. I did that faithfully for the first few years we lived here. Now we're like the villagers listening to the boy who cried wolf. After our first warm day, Kelly not only stayed out of the basement as the sirens wailed, he filmed the ensuing storm. With the perpetual thunder rumbling and the sirens going, it sounds like I imagine air raids in London did during WWII. If he can, I'll have him post a bit of it. The girls, still sensitive to the eerie sound, obey and run to the basement. I do the dishes and wait for the sirens to stop so I can put my kids to bed.

Twice, now. TWICE!

And the day after the storms, there are branches to pick up, mea culpas from the tornado experts who admit that perhaps they were a bit trigger-happy with the sirens, and cold temperatures once again. My children are outside right now in long pants and sweatshirts, just grateful that they don't have to wear gloves.

I would wish for warmer weather, but after the last two days...