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.

Let me confess right here, that the start of my little talks with you over
Easter weekend was a fluke, but also I think fortuitous. I love this time of
year, not so much for religious reasons, but for the official shaking off of
Houston's bi-polar wintry weather and the fact that it brings my family
together during this re-birth of all things green and flowery and, well...
fresh and beautiful.

And bluebonnets.  Nothing screams spring in Texas with more authority,
even if we do have cooler temps coaxing jackets out of our closets weeks
later. 
Bigger confession is the extent my family celebrates Easter, since you would
think I still have 4 toddlers roaming the house.  I don't.  Suffice it to say the
majority are complaining about college professors.  The youngest is still
poking us about wanting to get his OFFICIAL driver's license, rather than just
the permit currently residing in his wallet.  We have purposely let the request
fall on deaf ears, 'cause we are quite certain we will get a call from him after
a joyride to Florida.

Or worse, not get a call at all.


Anyhow, we still do Easter up big.  Dyeing eggs, PAINTING them, which is
my weakness, since I fervently labor to create marblelized masterpieces
with each one, hunched over in an artistic zone so focused, a tornado
could rip right through and I would still be sitting, brush in hand...painting
entirely unfazed.

I know now how DaVinci must have felt.  Ok, well, maybe not.

6 dozen eggs.  That's how many we boil, paint and scribble indecipherables
on with those tiny wax crayons just prior to dyeing.  As my kids have gotten
older, those wax crayon-inscribed eggs have gone from bearing their own
names, or maybe a barely recognizable bunny, to pictures of footballs and
basketballs, and having 'LeBron' written on them.  (Does he know kids in
Texas are making Easter eggs with his name on them?  I doubt it.)

At least we are being spared any members of the Kardashian clan appearing
on them.

Oh, and the Easter Egg hunt.  Yes, sorry to say we still do them.  Youngest,
driver's-permit-only child protests my announcements each March that the
hunt is being ceased.  His mantra is that his oldest sister kept getting to
participate in them at his age.  But this exponentially is the crux..she keeps
participating in them each year, so the hunt lives on in perpetuity.

I've given them all the fair warning, that the minute their own children
arrive on the scene at some unnamed future date (please be married,
though.  Parenting is hard enough on two people)...

...that the second they are knocking over their own offspring to get to the
eggs, they are done.

DONE.

A very Happy Easter to all.  Gotta go buy 4 chocolate bunnies and some
pastel Krabby Patties to fill their well-worn, much loved baskets.