I have lived in the midwest my whole life, except for three months that I lived in Southern England - which, in a strange coincidence, has weather that is almost exactly like the Midwest’s!  That is an irony that I did not really appreciate at the time. Now, as a midwesterner, I have become pretty used to the wild changes that our weather goes through; for example, even though it’s April, I still have flannel sheets and three blankets on my bed. 

But you will never catch midwesterners, and Ohioans in particular, not complaining about or commenting on the weather. For example, for a brief while, I lived in Chicago, IL.  Now, despite the fact that Chicago and Cleveland are both on the edges of lakes, both are in the midwest, and both experience almost exactly the same weather, my mother would invariably spend at least twenty minutes of all of our conversations chatting about the weather to me.  “What’s it like in Chicago?  Is it cold?  Is it supposed to rain?  How’s the wind, is it really windy?”  My mother would then go to her computer and track the weather changes as they moved west across the country: “Well, if Kate says that it was raining in Chicago, and the wind’s moving pretty fast, we should have some rain sometime tomorrow…” 

So is it really so startling that we’re barely getting 40 degree weather in mid April?  I say, no!  I say, we should be interested that for the first time in many years, we may have snow for the Passover/Easter season, and we should be excited about it.  Snow!  In April!  At least we’ve never had snow for my birthday in May, and that’s the way it should stay.