Celebrate living with 'weather'

Years ago, a visitor who chose to live most of his life in the suburbs of Philadelphia asked a biting question.

“Why, of all the places in the world you could live, would you choose Buffalo, New York?”

It was a criticism and a judgment and felt a bit like he was cheering for Michael Irvin’s broken neck. Philly people are a special kind of mean.

Anyway, I thought for a moment and had an answer.

“The weather.”

As John Steinbeck said in Travels with Charlie, something like “I can’t live in a place without weather.”

Why people choose to live in the soup bowl known as Florida, a land filled with alligators, poisonous snakes and hurricanes is beyond my comprehension because our natural disasters melt.

As I write this, our friends in the southtowns are getting blasted with snow. The Bills will play in the snow Sunday night.

We have, by choice, the blessing of living in Niagara Falls. Beth claimed she saw flurries today. I did not.

Visitors regularly ask tour guides here about how hard the winter here is.

“We have never had a 100 degree day because Lake Erie is a big air conditioner,” I say. “Warm air cools down when it crosses a cold lake in summer.

“The converse of that is late fall/early winter when cold air crosses a warm lake and makes lake effect snow. Years ago, the politicians, clueless about effective urban planning, built a football stadium in the middle of one of those snow bands. It guarantees we get two Bills games a year or that look like a nightmare.

“The truth is, we embrace it and, when there are 3 feet of snow at the stadium, we won’t have a flurry at our house.”

Urban planning is filled with mistakes, the Scajaquada, the Robert Moses Parkway, Niagara Falls Public Library and urban renewal as well as a new football stadium being built in the snowbelt as I type.

Friday we walked the Whirlpool Stairs and turned south following the Great Gorge Rail bed to the flats. We spotted about 5 pounds of winter oyster mushrooms on the west side of the trail but left them because I wasn’t sure what to cook with them and didn’t have a basket to bring home the bounty.

Today we will drive 20 minutes to Niagara-on-the-Lake to do some shopping and get some lunch. We will likely grab some wonton soup from Country Fresh donuts in Niagara Falls, Ontario before heading home.

I might also squeeze in one last mow and make sure the snowblower is in working order in case we ever need it.

Mowing is how I get rid of leaves. Putting them out with the trash is unconscionable. The excess I put in the compost.