Spring has sprung, and if you live in Ohio, it’s sprung from the looney bin of weather patterns into full-blown daily reality.
We live in Southwestern Ohio, about 25 miles from where I-70 and I-75 cross – the heart of America. It’s also the break line for every documented scary weather occurrence in the history of mankind. That may be a filthy lie, but the lay of the land dictates that Southern Ohio be in the center of a vortex where freezing cold belts of air from the Great Lakes meet warm, humid wind from the gulf, creating weather that changes violently approximately every 12 seconds.
The scary green doughnut pretty much sums up Ohio weather.The calendar says it’s Spring, and that means polishing the ol’ truck up. No more excuses about frigid temps when we wake up and the sun is shining and we have time to do it. We grab coffee, make a plan of attack, and start dragging everything out to do our battle with winter accumulations of “not shiny.” By the time we have everything ready to go, the clouds roll in and it starts sprinkling. We drag everything back into the garage and wait it out, as the forecast says it’s supposed to be sunny most of the day.
It stops sprinkling, but the temp has dropped. The sun peeks out long enough for us to drag half the stuff out again, since we don’t really trust that we’ll get anything done, and start polishing. I get a headlight done when I hear thunder. Mind you, the sun is shining, but thunder. Keep polishing, get to the second headlight, sun is still shining, lightning and thunder. Thinking that this was not meteorologically possible, I scurry to the garage with George and Google, “Can it thunder and lightning when the sun is shining, or are we cursed?”
Turns out, Google is no help for being cursed, but it is definitely possible for lightning to occur when there’s no indication of a storm. And thunder sometimes happens high enough up for there to be no visible cloud cover. So while we learned something, it got visibly cloudy, the polished headlights got covered with mist again. Then it started snowing.
“It doesn’t look like we’re going to get this done any time soon today, let’s pack it in.”
And we spent 20 minutes putting everything back where it belongs, while it thunder-snowed enough to cover the ground. Of course, about the time we closed the garage door and found inside things to do, the sun came out again, and stayed out all day long with no incident. We didn’t tempt fate and drag the polishing stuff out again, I just ran out every now and then and took a few swipes at the chrome, before Mother Nature noticed I was trying to accomplish an outdoor task and thought something weather-like up that involved snakes and frogs.
Welcome to Springtime in Ohio, folks. Put on your water wings, wind sails and parkas, and exit through the gift shop, please!
