Tired of Winter

Another winter weather advisory!  I am tired of being cold.  I hate to say this because although it has been a longer and colder winter than normal here in North Carolina it has been nothing compared to most of the country.  But I don’t live in most of the country.  I live in North Carolina for a reason.

About twenty years ago, when Russ and I were first married we lived in New Jersey for one long cold winter.  We had fifteen major snowstorms in twelve weeks and to top it off I was working in Canada where it was even colder.

Now living in New Jersey was not fun for me in the first place.  I had very few close friends and was somewhat of a fish out of water on the street where we lived.  Jim a lineman for the electric company and his wife lived on one side and Jim a lineman for the phone company and his wife lived on the other side of us.  All perfectly nice, but we had nothing in common.  All I knew about linemen I learned from Glen Campbell.

When Russ decided to look at business schools in the middle of that winter I had two requests:  It needed to be in a place with a shorter winter and near a good airport since I would still be flying to my job.  Russ was very interested in Dartmouth and Cornell… no and no, for both of my requests.  Then North Carolina came up as a contender.

I looked at the weather chart in USA Today as I sat in the Ottawa airport.  Negative 20 in Toronto, 5 degrees in Philadelphia, 60 degrees in Durham.  It was a no brainer.  Please God, I prayed, pick North Carolina.  And my prayers were answered.

For the last twenty years I have hardly had to endure a bad winter.  Even this one as tiring as it has been is nothing compared to one month of winter in the north.  So if you live above the Mason Dixon line and are sick of living through a horrific winter consider moving to Durham.  The people are nice, we welcome new people — even Yankees, the living is easy and the winter is better than the one you had where you are now.

When it is cold outside I think back to New Jersey and put the whole thing in perspective — the best part of living here is the neighbors are friends and we have a lot more in common.