Enjoy your seasons, y’all!

My Montana friends say they wouldn’t enjoy the south, because they would miss the seasons. Obviously they don’t know that Louisiana does indeed have seasons; we just don’t have to be hit upside the head with a 2x4 to let us know the season has changed.

They have been scraping frost from their windshields for more that a month in the Big Sky Country. Its been snowing in the northern Rockies for weeks. Last weekend Montana State University played their homecoming football game in three inches of snow. That’s not unusual for October in Montana; it will continue to snow off an on for the next 7 months. Enjoy your seasons up there, y’all!

In Montana you had to go out in sub-zero temperatures and shovel the driveway just to get out to go to school, work, to the store, or in Grandma’s case to get to her weekly hair appointment.

Those Montana friends complain about the heat and humidity of the south. You know what? We don’t have to go out in the extreme heat and shovel humidity. I’ll take that trade-off any day.

So how do we measure the seasons? In Montana it was something like this for me:

As a kid fall began with the first day of school.

In high school and college it was the first day of football.

As a geography teacher I used the scientific purity of defining the seasons by the relationship of the sun to the earth: summer and winter solstice (longest and shortest days) and spring and fall equinox (the days with equal hours of sun and dark).

Then there were the psychic seasons: First frost – last frost; Snow tires on - snow tires off; Golf weather – ski weather, Mow the grass - rake the leaves - shovel the snow.

Now our forecast is showing that summer may finally be over here in Shreveport. Enjoy the cool, dry air.