Things I Know I Know

I wrote this in Chainsaw on Hand:

If it were suddenly summer in South Dakota after a week of minus two, you would hate it--it would be too hot and too humid and frightening, like the world was ending in fire instead of ice. In South Dakota in winter, you don’t think about seventy degrees or eighty degrees. As far as you’re concerned the tropics don’t exist; palm trees, blue waters--they’re just a television fantasy. Twenty degrees would be enough. If the temperature got up to twenty degrees, you’d unbutton your jacket and shed an entire layer of long underwear. At twenty degrees you’d walk outside without your head covered, with your face turned toward the sun, like you were living in Bermuda. Twenty degrees in South Dakota in winter would give you enough hope to go on.

And as we learned today in Iowa, when it is suddenly 45 after a month where the average temperature is 12, you can walk around pretty comfortably without a coat on (some people can walk around with tee-shirts and shorts on, but the jury's still out on whether they are comfortable or not).