When It Comes To The Weather, Nature Doesn’t Play Favorites– Only Men Do

Nature doesn’t prefer one form of weather to another. It’s Man who does. Or some men — and it depends on where those men live, and what weather they are used to, and what weather they seldom, or never, get to experience. If you live  near the Equator, you don’t yearn for a beaker full of the warm south, as you would if you lived on Hampstead Heath. If you live in sun-starved Germany, even under an occasional sky of Prussian blue, Goethe’s Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen bluhm will certainly make you dream of lands away, and the impulse that verse exploits helps to explain all those German tourists now able, as they were not when those verses were written, to visit by the tens of thousands the isle of Capri. A Russian child’s famous wish goes like this: Pust vsegda budet solntse (may the sun always be), a sentiment deemed so simple, obvious, and universal, that it is found in Russian first-grade readers. But it might not be true for someone in the desarts adust of the Sahara, or the savannahs of sub-Saharan Africa.. No, when it comes to the weather, pust budet anything at all, depending only on what you as a matter of course have and have not. As for me, and possibly you, I say bring on the blizzard, make way for the heaviest conceivable Metel‘. As long, of course, as we are all l-l–beaned-up. As the old song says, in its clear-eyed version, “I’ve got my gloves to keep me warm.”