Two things folks in our great country deal with.  Scorchingly oppressive heat and mind-numbingly frigid cold.  Sometimes simultaneously, depending on where your butt is situated. I’ve mentioned I’m a Texas girl, and like all the others in our fair state…currently am desperately waiting for Blue Bell to hit the shelves again, listeria be damned. You’ll catch me on the southern edge of Texas…been a Houstonian nearly all my life.  Innately content about that fact, as well.

What Houstonians don’t understand is why anyone north of our balmy Gulf Coast tropic region lives where they do. Oh, sure, we have hellacious heat, but it has a simple antidote.  A/C.  A damned lot of A/C.  When it’s 132 Hades-laden degrees in August, humidity gasping at 247%, and no breeze having slipped though since Memorial Day, we escape from one temperately-cooled clime to the next.  Home to car to work to grocery store back to home. We’ll only sit at an outside patio after 10 pm as long as we’re cooled with an ice-cold adult beverage and an overhead fan set to ForceFieldBlastLevel1000, whirring maniacally, as if at any moment it could detach itself and spin off into its own wholly independent, extra-terrestrial existence.

One tidbit we’ve learned however, is that having a posse of friends surrounding you, jointly braving the heat and ceiling fans debating an alternative lifestyle… with SEVERAL frosty adult beverages at your beckoning…can make even the steamiest of evenings thoroughly enjoyable.

So minus the random knee-deep floods and F5 hurricanes which threaten every other decade or so, south Texans have it good.  No earthquakes, no forest fires, no landslides (and that’s just California). It’s hot, but we manage, and if I had the dough, I’m thinking an investment in Trane might be in order. But every winter a phenomenon so alien, so foreign to us emerges…and for a city which gives the term ‘melting pot’ a new meaning, where NASA and energy execs co-exist in tandem with the world’s largest rodeo, well it takes quite an event to make us put our sweet tea and tequila shots down and take notice.

Keep up.  That’s two separate drinks.  We don’t mix tea and tequila.

Wait….hummm..ok, had to ponder that.  I may have an experiment to conduct in my near future. Purely research purposes, you understand.

Anyhow, all winter we watch our northern neighbors bundled up to their glazed eyeballs, digging their cars out of 6 feet snowbanks and pushing some funky little machine whose sole purpose in life seems to simply shift snow from one place to another, without actually solving the real dilemma.

You’ve got too damn much snow.

We don’t understand having to keep emergency provisions in your trunks for blizzards.  The only blizzards we get are given to us through a drive-thru…with all our favorite candy bits heavenly crushed up and whipped together in a pseudo-ice cream confection (don’t tell Blue Bell that we’ve had to defect momentarily.  Desperate times call for desperate measures.)

Blizzards.  Ice skating al fresco. Something called “Black Ice” (which sounds like something you’d be buying from a guy named Crash standing on a street corner). Icicles that can cause true bodily harm. We’ve all seen the perennial classic A Christmas Story… 

“Ralphie, you’re lucky it didn’t cut your eye! Those icicles have been known to kill people.”

So for all of you fine folks who have spent the better part of this past winter gritching about snow and ice and negative-temps and even more snow and ice, let me be the first to tell you…

Life doesn’t have to be that way.

Come on down to Houston. Doesn’t matter how Yankee you sound, or if you play lacrosse. We get that you have mudrooms and basements.  We don’t, but that’s ok. And we promise not to be puzzled by your salt-rusted fenders. We’ll teach you how to say you’re fixin’ to do something. And y’all.  And to appreciate the sweetness and comfort of being called honey. And also show you all the wondrous glories of Tex-Mex. 

Come on down. We’ll leave the light on for ya.

Oh, just don’t forget your mosquito spray.