Even now that even the mountains of plowed-up snow have finally (I think), melted, pretty much all the conversation here on the Outer Cape consists of complaining about the miseries of this winter, the endless shovelling and hacking at ice, the days stuck in the house, the concussions from falls, the backs thrown out from over-exertion.
Hearing so many complaints, you could be excused for thinking that most people would move south in a second if they didn’t have jobs, families, lives here. But you would be wrong about that. In fact the complaining is less evidence of genuine dissatisfaction than it is pleasureful compensation.
Cape Codders complain about most of our weather, all of it in fact except for that very short interval, sometimes as little as a day or two, between weather complained about as too chilly and the weather complained about because it’s too hot. (Some call that interval Spring; some think it’s too short to be given the standing of an actual season.) Just as in the song about the West where “seldom is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day,” here, where the skies last December were cloudy for—count ’em–23 straight days, rarely is heard an encouraging word—and that’s how we like it.
What’s hard for us to imagine is weather like they have in California, day after sunny, temperate day, where your picnic never gets rained out, and there’s no excuse for creative whining. Whatever, we wonder, do they talk about at those picnics?
Mark Twain is supposed to have made the remark that “everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” Cape Codders know he’s wrong. Talking about it—more specifically complaining about it—is all you can do about it.
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