BY HEART
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Read the Blog
  • Get the Book
  • The Whitney Journals
  • Remembering Lee
  • Archived Blog Posts

Blog Posts

These columns were originally published in the Kings County Record between 1984 and 2016.
The illustrations are by Alice, most of the photographs are by Lee

Beware Statistics

3/1/2018

Comments

 
PictureArtwork © Alice Whitney
©  R. L. Whitney.  Originally Published in the King's County Record, February 21, 2012.  

It all started when we came down here to stay. There was a country-store type thermometer hanging on the little kitchen porch and I had my father's old barometer to hang up inside. What could be more inevitable than to begin to keep track, in a gardener's calendar, of the progress of the temperature and barometric pressure with a view to being able to tell when it was time to do whatever we needed to do, like plant beans or pick the tomatoes?
The first summer we were here a long series of days with temperatures in the 30's gave me joy, having always preferred heat to cold. Many years in Toronto where it was perfectly possible to have really hot weather at Easter and chilly weather the rest of the summer made us long for country where summer meant something more (or rather, less) than long sleeves and sweaters.

 
Temperatures like those of our first summer have never returned in quite the same startling way. I rather suspect that the old thermometer had something to do with it. Hanging where it did, facing into the south-west and sun, it was perfectly sited to report enthusiastically on the effect of direct sunlight on white clapboards.
The next year we put the thermometer in the woodshed. There the sun was not a problem but the enclosed space was. Unlike the year before when the heat had been so prominent in our record-keeping, now a distinct chill crept into our readings, even on what otherwise seemed to be hot days in mid summer.
By the time the next summer rolled around we had done a bit of construction and now had a new porch on the back of the house, facing north-west rather than south-west. To accompany our new porch we had a new thermometer, one that would tell the current temperature but would also remember the day's high and low. I mounted the new thermometer on one of the porch pillars, facing in rather than out so it couldn’t catch the late afternoon sun.
I think it was the following winter that I first got carried away by statistics. Looking back over the records from the previous year I saw that by February the average temperature, while cold, was beginning to move gradually upwards. The previous February, however, with a house full of active youngsters, we had learned a new term: cabin fever. With February coming round again I thought I could calm fever pitch amongst the young, and so, as benign scientific guru, I began a chart on which we could all see the advance of the average temperature from week to week, even if we couldn't feel it.
The last day in January a thaw that had begun a week before still held sway, the ground showed grass greening up and the daytime high temperature well above freezing. I got out a piece of graph paper, numbered the days in February across the bottom and degrees up the side, allowing for the possibility that the daily average temperature might occasionally fall back below zero. When I wrote up the day’s events that night I casually noted that the evening temperature, for the first time in a week, had crept below zero.
I think that was the coldest February in these parts for the last century. A fierce north-west wind blew for two weeks. The weather was so cold that the dirt floor in the root cellar froze all the way to the middle. It was so cold our water pipes to the kitchen sink (all we had) froze. It was so cold I had to add another piece of graph paper below the original one to track the dismal record, sufficient to depress a polar bear, of steadily dropping temperatures. Needless to say the chart eventually started an upturn, but nobody was watching.
As the years went along and the records kept accumulating I thought I could say, within two standard deviations, when the last frost in the spring was likely to menace our garden and when the approach of the first frost in the fall made tomato picking advisable. Statistics were once again exercising their hypnotic fascination.
I announced with the measured tones of one secure in impeccable statistics that once we got past the first week in March the daytime high would not again fall below freezing. Blessed thought, and well before the first day of spring. All went just as predicted until the middle of March, at which point the mercury in the thermometer congealed and all pretence of warm days vanished. The warm days came back, eventually, but my standing as an oracle has never recovered.
Comments

    Words & Images

    We moved to our farm in Sussex, New Brunswick from Toronto in 1977, only moving away in 2014. 

    For over 30 years of our life there, I wrote a weekly column for the Kings County Record in Sussex chronicling the little events that are the heart of ‘daily life’ in a small place in the country.  These blog posts are drawn from those columns.

    The weekly column became, over the years, a series of bench-marks or surveyor’s stakes to record the contours of the place we lived, its dreaming hills and fertile valleys, icy chasms and swift-flowing streams. 

    While I no longer live on the farm, we continue to share the columns from time to time on this blog.  And very soon you will be able to read my book!  To be published in December 2019.  

    ----
    Images on the blog are drawn from my own photography,  and my wife Alice's artwork.  We occasionally resort to other people's images when nothing we have on hand suits the content of the post.  

    Archives

    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    September 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    February 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016

    Categories

    All
    Appalachian
    Back To The Land
    Beetles
    Birds
    Cats
    Chickens
    Children
    Chokecherry
    Christmas
    Cows
    Crossword Puzzles
    Dandelion
    Dogs
    Farm
    Farming
    Fruit Wines
    Garden
    Geology
    God
    Hagarenes
    Haying
    Hinduism
    History
    Homesteading
    Kittatinny
    Livestock
    Moab
    Murder Mysteries
    Pennsylvania
    Pets
    Politics
    Psalms
    Rhubarb
    Seasons
    Shenandoah
    Spiders
    Spring
    Strawberries
    Toronto
    Tuscarora
    Virginia
    Weather
    William Cobbett
    Winemaking
    Winter

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Read the Blog
  • Get the Book
  • The Whitney Journals
  • Remembering Lee
  • Archived Blog Posts