One day last week when I was moaning about having to run to my car in the rain, a friend reminded me, “Well, you can’t control the weather.”
I thought about that on my way home and realized the statement isn’t true. You absolutely can control the weather.
Easter is coming up in a week or so, and some of you are shopping for your Easter outfit. If you don’t believe you can control the weather, just finish your shopping, dress in your new outfit Easter morning and watch what the weather does.
If you buy a thin, summery dress, you’ll set up perfect conditions to freeze the tail off the Easter bunny. If you play it safe and purchase something wooly with long sleeves, you’ll produce a heat wave that will sear the woolies right off you before you can climb down, steaming, from the choir loft that Sunday.
Since I don’t buy Easter outfits, I’ll leave it to you to decide what our weather will be on March 31. Then I’ll get up that morning and match my outfit to the temperature for the day.
Planning a trip to the beach this spring before the summer crowds pile into Gulf Shores? Then you’ll want to dial up the perfect weather, though “perfect” depends on what you like.
If you want it warm, pack a coat and some long underwear, as if you’re preparing for a snow storm. Heavy clothing seems to scare away the cold winds.
If you prefer that it stays cooler, bust out your short pants and sleeveless tops. You won’t be able to wear them, but just the appearance of summer gear brings the cold front back through, and you won’t have to battle the hot sand. As an added bonus, the chill will run most of the crowd off the beach, and you’ll have it to yourself. This is great if you ate too much fudge this winter and your swimsuit is not your friend. There’ll be no one out there to snicker at you.
As you can see, weather works like many other things in life— ironically. If you want a certain condition, prepare for the opposite. It’s as if Mother Nature delights in upsetting our plans.
We were going to fly to Alaska a few years ago for a cruise, and I didn’t want to pay extra for an overweight suitcase. I went through and tossed out the long johns, the fleece tops and the turtle necks I had packed for “just in case.” After all, I thought, it’s June. How cold can Alaska be in June?
Very, very cold, as it turned out. If I hadn’t put back one fleece jacket, I would have frozen to death on our first stop in Ketchikan. And even with the jacket, I had to buy a heavy wool scarf and walk very fast every time I left our cruise ship.
I took some of the wrong clothes, but I really blamed the cold on one particular woman on the cruise. She arrived on board in white linen, perhaps having mistaken an Alaskan cruise for a Caribbean cruise. I felt a little sorry for her. She had to stay huddled in her stateroom under blankets the whole time, unable to leave the ship in her summery duds.
While I felt sorry for her, I was a little miffed at her too. I know it was her suitcase full of summer linen that set us up for the Arctic cold snap.
This irony works to control the presence or absence of rain also.
Of course, everyone knows that if you need a dry day, go to all the trouble of digging your umbrella out of the trunk of your car and haul it around with you. You won’t see a drop of rain.
Do you need a longer spell of warm, dry weather to get your garden in? Order an expensive raincoat and pay for overnight delivery. Or fertilize your lawn with the stuff that burns the grass if it doesn’t get rain. Old Mother Nature will withhold moisture for months, just out of spite. The grass will die, but you’ll get your dry spell. There must have been a lot of pricy raincoats ordered in the county last summer, resulting in the drought we experienced.
If you do need rain on your lawn, you can manipulate Mother Nature by hiding your umbrella in the back of the upstairs linen closet. Wish I had thought of that when it hit 104 degrees last August.
Do you need enough rain to fill up your pond? That’s easy. Plan an outdoor wedding. That will soggy things up. To dial up a monsoon if your pond is really big, invite 50 of your relatives over for a reunion and plan to feed and entertain them outdoors all weekend.
If we see the drought beginning again this summer, consider these tips and maybe we can keep a few more of our trees alive this time!
Remember that old TV commercial a few years back that said, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature”?
Don’t believe it. If you take the right steps, which really look like the “wrong” steps, you can fool the old girl every time, and she’ll never even know she’s being bamboozled!
