Inside looking out: Weather or not

Ah, another beautiful day in the Poconos!

Thirty-six degree rain hammers the slick roadways with a thick blanket of fog reducing visibility to near nothing. Add a 15 mile an hour wind to the recipe over the woodsy patches of dirty snow and you say with a wry smile, can it get any better than this?

It’s April! It’s April! I had to say that again to startle my mind away from my anticipation of warm sun, tulips, daffodils, fishing on the lake, and baseball games.

Scientific studies prove that weather affects how we feel. We get vitamin D from the sun, and that elevates our moods even to thoughts of romance. Surveys indicate that warm, sunny days give a single guy a better chance to get a girl’s phone number.

When the weather is nice, we have better memory, we leave higher tips at restaurants, and we have less road rage. The one negative about blue skies and warming temperatures is that the number of house robberies increase until the thermometer reaches 90 degrees. Apparently, the bad guys don’t like running across someone’s backyard carrying a flat-screen TV in all that heat.

During this extended winter season, you would think our kids’ test scores should soar through the roof. Gloomy days help improve student academic focus, and the opposite is true once we get into 70s and some real spring weather. Grades may get higher, but pervading gray skies can contribute to depression and even suicide.

There are ways to help keep up our spirits as we wait for Mother Nature to relieve our long winter blahs. Natural sunlight can be bought in the store in the form of specialty lamps. Decorating our walls with pictures of nature helps, too. You can also stare at green golf courses and tropical islands on your TV screen.

Of course, our “friends” in Florida love to tell us that it’s 85 degrees and sunny there when we’re still zipping up our winter jackets here, but you won’t hear a peep out of them this summer when it’s 95 degrees and 95 percent humidity and they are locked inside their homes, held prisoners by their air conditioners.

They say the healthiest place to live in America is San Diego, California, where the year-round average is 76 degrees with 276 days filled with sun. The city boasts of the most nonagenarians, people in their 90s. They have a men’s softball league in San Diego in which the minimum age to play is 90.

Before you pack your packs to move there, know that the average price for a modest house will cost you $487,000 and you’ll need at least a salary of $98,500 to cover your cost of living.

So let’s put away our fantasies of living in San Diego, or how about Hawaii, which is even more expensive than Southern California until our Mountain Mama sends us a few monarch butterflies.

There is one song that still to this day lifts my spirits, even if the weather is not motivating my mood. The Young Rascals sing it.

“It’s a beautiful mornin’. I think I’ll go outside for a while and just smile. Just take in some clean fresh air, boy. Ain’t no sense in stayin’ inside if the weather is fine and you got the time … there will be children and robins and flowers. Sunshine caresses each new waking hour … it’s a beautiful mornin’.”

The weather is oftentimes something we just travel through to move along with our busy lives. American humorist Kin Hubbard reminds us that we never forget our climate when he wrote, “Don’t knock the weather. If it didn’t change once in a while, nine out of 10 people couldn’t start a conversation.”

Famous American poet Emily Dickinson, a recluse later in her life, got the inspiration for many of her poems from looking out her bedroom window. Staring through glass distorts the reality of what’s happening on the other side. As I sit on my couch, the trees move with the wind in absolute silence. I can’t breathe the fresh air or feel the warmth of the sun. No wonder much of Dickinson’s poetry was about death and darkness.

In South Africa, weathermen face fines or jail time if they get the forecasts wrong. Well, if I were one working the map there, my forecast would be the same every day.

“Most of today there will be light outside, and at some point tonight, the sky will become dark.”

Former Pittsburgh Pirate manager Chuck Tanner put the weather into a perspective when he said, “You can have money piled up to the ceiling, but the size of your funeral is still going to depend on the weather.”

Hopefully, this weekend we will finally turn the page and I can put away my snow shovel and tune up my lawn mower.

I wonder. Do people who live on a tropical island ever get bored with the same beautiful weather everyday?

Rich Strack can be reached at katehep11@gmail.com.