Sunbelt Psychosis

The day I knew, I mean really knew that I’d left Los Angeles was the day I heard a Syracuse weatherman giving the national weather extremes. “It’s a beautiful 82 degrees in Waco, Texas,” he said with the bouncy enthusiasm typical of his breed, “and in Duluth, Minnesota, they’ve got a kind of beauty all their own, a cold crystalline beauty at 14 below.” I knew I wasn’t in L.A., because in L.A. the weatherperson would have said something like, “It’s a bone-chilling 14 below in Duluth,” and the anchorperson would have segued in with a shuddering, “Brr…I’d rather be stuck on the freeway.” Watching snow descend like a blessing on the fields beyond my window, I can’t help but wonder at the Sunbelt psychosis that seems to have slipped even more silently over the American mind.

Time was when winter in the rural Northeast meant chopping wood for inefficient pot-bellied stoves that couldn...