It will end. Allegedly.
It will get warmer. One day. Someday.
Won’t it?
We have reached the 69th day of winter. It seems like the 6,669th. Pretty much the same nonsense is reprised day after day. Miserable, punishing, obnoxious, teeth-rattling, bone-numbing weather. Unmitigated, merciless, are-you-kidding-me cold.
New Yorkers cannot recall the last time they walked with their eyes trained forward, rather than watching for ice patches waiting to send them flying, which leaves them vulnerable to ice sliding off buildings from above. And in the evenings the snowplows screech past, drowning out the television in the middle of a Letterman cold joke.
Throughout the parks, on the edges of sidewalks, ice just sits with defiant, assertive permanency. It will not melt, just keeps getting icier and more discolored. The whole city feels like a giant ice cube. People lean into the wind, pull hard to get doors open, to get out of this weather already, as the whistling wind pushes back.
As it limps away, February will not be missed. With the average temperature for the month lingering around 24 degrees, some 11 degrees shy of normal by the National Weather Service’s calculation, this insult of a month looks as though it will clock in as the coldest recorded February in New York City since 1934. That is 81 years of weather. That is all the way back to the Depression, when there were so many more dire things to worry about than whether 7-Eleven had salt or whose turn it was to walk the dog.
–
“If you’re going to be outside, you got to go for the thermals,” he pointed out, unnecessarily.
Bogdan Lekan, 50, a pediatrician, tossed salt chunks on the ice in front of his office door on 67th Avenue in Queens. Stethoscope dangling around his neck, he kicked at the crumbling ice with his leather shoes, which instantly became soaked.
“If this happens through April — wow,” he said. “I have a 3-year-old in the house who is anxious to go out.”
Now a new month beckons. March, often a roller-coaster month, is not always charitable with its weather either. But it represents a dash of hope. The forecast for Monday in New York City is for the temperature to crawl into the 40s. It has to get warmer someday.
C.J. Hughes and Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
Go to Home Page »
