Down the Rabbit Hole

Hurricanes & Bonefire Weather Oh My!

30 Day Blogging Challenge
PROMPT January 29th
Allow me to share this quote regarding my local weather this week: ”Dangerous wind chills of -45 degrees F (-43 C) to -65 degrees F (-54 C) are expected for most of the period from Tuesday night through Thursday morning. This is a life-threatening situation...” etcetera, etcetera... stay inside... frostbite... etcetera.
My question for you has two parts: What is the worst weather you’ve experienced? And what is your ideal weather?

In Southeast New England, we have alternated between winters that heap on the snow or, like this one, subject us to brief and bitter cold snaps and not a lot of the white stuff. This past summer was the most humid on record and it was horrendous. We seem to deal in extremes in my neck of the woods. Still, I would take snow over heat and humidity most years. Ideally, I would like it be early Fall all year round. Warm enough for long sleeves in the day, sweatshirt and bonfire weather come night. The weather that typically comes in on the heels of late September and stays until just after Halloween. The leaves turn colorful, there is that magical chill in the night air and the days are defined by bright sunshine. It is still warm enough for dingy rides up the Mystic river or to pick apples in your shirt sleeves by day but chilly enough to light a fire in the autumn evenings to ward off the coming cold. Of course, this near perfect weather also happens to fall in hurricane season for us here. So there is that...
The worst weather I've been in was during a hurricane in early October a few years back. It rained for days, so hard that the back yard turned into a lake. It was miserable with the dogs. Lots of trees came down, lots of people were out of power for days that stretched into weeks. It was the wind that was the worst, it whipped across the yard and churned the tops of the massive trees around like some kind of Hollywood special effect.
It is rare that a hurricane doesn't lose most of its punch before it hits our section of the East Coast. We watch news coverage of the damage in the Carolina's and Outer Banks and feel badly for those people, all the while knowing their Cat 4 hurricane will be a weakened tropical storm by the time it hits our shores...most often than not. Sometimes though, one of those intrepid storms will just surge on up, or dip out to see to get some more mojo before circling back to give us a direct hit. It hasn't happened very often and New Englanders mark every few decades with a raging storm like Bob, Carol, Gloria and Sandy.