Recently I’ve been traveling a lot.

The travel wasn’t for pleasure. Beyond that, I’d rather not discuss the reason, thank you.

What I do want to talk about is the weather. Or, more specifically, the contrasts in weather. I think one sometimes notices things more acutely when one moves rapidly from one place to another this winter—especially from cold places to warm ones, or vice versa.

There's nothing deep in this post, except some pictures of the snow. It's just travelogue. Join me for a walk, and for a few observations along the way, if that's your kind of fare.

When I left New England, it was more than 20 degrees below zero. When I got to Florida, it was upwards of 70 degrees. When I’d say “It’s a hundred degrees warmer here than it was in New England,” it either didn’t register or people thought I was kidding or they just couldn’t do the math. I got no reaction. But if I said the magic words “below zero” to describe where I'd come from, suddenly they understood.

I’m not sure they knew what that meant in any precise way. I’m sure many didn’t know the difference between ten below and thirty below. I imagine they’d just never had to use such words to describe a temperature, and yet they’d seen what they felt was cold weather. So perhaps my words just meant “colder than cold” to them.

Depending on what you’re used to, the degrees matter in different ways. People in Florida bragged about being the only state in the nation that hadn’t seen snow this season. But when the temperature fell into the 60’s or 50’s, they grabbed for sweatshirts and jackets, even their furry boots, and scampered toward the warm safety of the indoors.

I didn’t take many pictures in Florida. It wasn’t that kind of trip. But I did take this one, and perhaps you get the idea. It was not below zero.

It’s easy to laugh now, but I lived for a while in the Panama Canal Zone growing up, where the temperature never seems to get below 70. My father would tell tales of his youth there, and how once he went camping in the “mountains” and the temperatures fell to 60, and how cold it was. It’s all what you’re used to, I guess. When I arrived there, I suffered intensely for the first six months. It was so humid and I was sweating all the time. At some point, I just learned to stop fighting it, and it was fine.

When I headed off to MIT for college, the adjustment to New England weather was hard for me. I had come from a world where if the sky was clear, it was warm out. I’d look out the window at the dorm and see blue skies and then be shocked at how cold it was when I went outside. I froze that year. It was horrible. Then, finally, I learned to dress for the weather, and more importantly to expect the cold weather. I bought a decent winter jacket. But I also learned to stop fighting the fact that it was going to sometimes be cold. And it was again fine.

So I arrived in the Florida warmth wearing two pairs of socks, sweat pants under my regular pants, a long sleeve shirt, a sweatshirt, and a serious winter jacket. The natives probably thought I didn’t know better, but I did. I probably looked dreadfully out of place. A few weeks before, in December, I’d made the same trip wearing only a sweater and figuring that was enough. But on that occasion it was only thirty degrees when I left, and weather.com said it would be about the same when I returned. On this occasion, it was negative digits just before leaving and I didn’t have any idea what it would be like when I returned. I was willing to embarrass myself by carrying too much clothing if it meant having the right stuff available when I returned. Layers are everything in cold weather.

And I had to wear those layers, of course, because the pieces of clothing were so bulky they would have filled an entire extra bag. And the airlines are so picky these days about how many bags you carry on a trip. If you wear it, it’s not counted as one of your carry-on items.

I spent the following week in the Phoenix. Weatherwise, it was like a repeat of Florida. Even as temperatures fell to the 50’s and 40’s, people seemed uncomfortable being outdoors and were already rushing for shelter. I have to admit it was easier to muster sympathy for them when it fell to the 20’s, though. They’re really not used to that. I lived in Arizona for a while growing up, too, and this is a place that closed school just for rain. The only extreme of temperature Phoenix is equipped for is the summer heat, which admittely has been really severe of late. Then again, as someone always injects at this point, “it’s a dry heat.” New England heat is not as high, but many say the humidity makes it worse.

I don’t have any pictures of Arizona from this recent trip, so you’ll have to settle for a “file photo” from another of my trips. I’m not sure if the time of year is right in the picture—that’s what you get with file photos—but with minor variations, Arizona looks like this pretty much all the time. Mostly.

Oh, and it turns out all that bulky clothing doesn’t help at the TSA station. At the Phoenix airport, they kept asking me if my pockets were empty and I kept saying “yes, really, they are.” Finally I realized to say “I have sweat pants on under my regular pants” and that seemed to make them feel better about the way my pants were bulked up. At least they were paying attention. I still ended up in the stupid full body scanner, though.

And then, finally, I was home, a couple days after the big storm that sent the whole country into a frenzy. I had escaped its direct effects, but I got home in time to see the aftermath. It wasn’t actually as bad as I expected. New England is used to this kind of thing from time to time, although I realize other areas don’t see such storms as often. The following is a picture from my front yard in 2005, for example:

As further proof of the normalcy of this, here’s a photo from 2003 at my previous home. Note that my Celica is pretty much buried in the snow:

It’s hard to get a sense of perspective, so here’s the same scene the next day with my car excavated. I hope this shows how three-dimensional a New England snow scene can be:

That storm was actually scarier to me than the one we’ve just had because the snow was getting high enough I wasn’t sure where to put it all. It was only about three feet deep, but once I shoveled out my drive, the walls were almost 6 feet. It’s hard to toss the snow that high, and it would have been a lot harder if more snow had come. It’s sort of like folding all the snow from the driveway onto the nearby piles, but you get to where you just can’t do it any more.

By the way, if you look carefully in that first 2003 picture above, where my car is covered in snow, you’ll see across the street some little dots in the snow at the left edge. Those are mailboxes. Here’s a close-up. Again, this illustrates just another detail of the way the snow impacts us. Some people get mail delivered to their porch, and then having a path to the porch is always essential. But even if you have a mailbox on the street, it requires some care to make sure you can still get your mail!

Well, as you can see, some years in New England we get more snow than others. And here we are back in 2011 as I returned back home this week. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect since I wasn’t here to watch it fall. But you’ve seen, three feet of sitting snow after a series of snowfalls is interesting, but not shocking. So the scene wasn’t totally unexpected. Still, it was visually interesting, especially because I’d so recently been away in the comparative warm. So I’ll highlight a few other elements of the scene that caught my eye.

I got in at night, and the house was lined with the tinsel of icicles:

This next is taken in the daylight the next day. The blocky look of the snow is because our neighbor Ben came through with his snowblower, saving us from a great deal of manual labor.

Once again, in a sea of white it’s sometimes hard to get your visual bearings, but note that my wife’s pickup truck, still laiden with a literal truckload of snow, was largely occluded by a bank of snow. So you have some sense of the height in this next shot:

Here’s another detail that people not from the area might not think about. Fire hydrants have little poles that stick up from them so they can be found in deep snow and dug out. Each of the hydrants along our street had been carefully excavated:

Some regular services, like our clothes dryer, were a bit hard to get to. You can see it out there in the back yard. This time of year we have indoor drying racks we use, for obvious reasons:

The icicles on the house were really impressive in the daylight, too:

Looking out the back door, it was almost like being in a prison of icy bars. Through those bars, you can see the clothes line was calling out to us, taunting us from just beyond the door. But the privilege of reaching it would have to wait until another day:

Some of those icicles actually extended all the way to the ground, by the way:

After a while, the icicles fell. It was a warm night. It can be quite noisy when a bunch of icicles or big load of snow from the roof finally crashes to the ground.

The result of these falls can be visually dramatic sometimes, as well. Here’s what it looked like when some icicles fell a few weeks ago—once again, it has a sort of prison barb motif going:

Fortunately for us, it was a gentle prison. We had electricity, water, heat, food, cable, and internet so we were all set. We were tucked in safe, in other words, not really prisoners against our will. It’s very pretty outside, and we could just watch it through the window, almost like it was on television.

Sometimes all that snow falls on tree branches and downs power lines—then it gets to be less fun for those affected. That wasn’t us this time, thank goodness. It was just New England at its winter best.

My friends will be surprised that I got this far without mentioning Climate Change. I’ll back get to that in another post soon. For today I thought I’d just keep it light—if mountains of heavy snow can be called light.