Bettina Juszak

Staff Writer

…or how we are never happy with any weather.

Musings on American culture by a German exchange student.

It is snowing. Snowing! Snowing in spring. It is not supposed to snow in spring. Rain, sunshine, warmer weather, yes, but not really cold – and snowing.

Flashback to last summer; when I came here it was so hot one couldn’t stand to be outside for long doing anything in the way of exertion – then the life saver was the swimming pool in the back yard.

Flasback to fall; now that was a pleasant time of year – except for the darkness and cold. I had expected rain, that’s what’s usually happening in Germany in fall, but there was next to none.

Flashback to winter (yes, the past tense – winter is officially supposed to be over even if itself is a bit slow in getting that); it was freezing, mounds of snow everywhere, ice – then the life savers proved to be the snow blower and heat in the house.

Back to the present; the mounds are gone, but the temperatures and the occasional snow isn’t (talk about irony when snow falls on the first day of spring…). Now we have a roller coaster of weather conditions changing from nicely warm (one day, it was one day!), to brrr cold, to snow, to rain. Apparently instead of fall, here spring is the yucky month.

Which brings me back to my first point. We humans never seem to be happy with the weather (and I’m not excluding myself). Either it’s too warm, or too cold, or too snowy, or there is no snow, etc. Funny, isn’t it? That doesn’t seem to be any different in the States than in Germany.