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More Down Yonder

• Down Yonder: The dawn of change
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“Spring is sprung, the grass is ris.

“I wonder where them flowers is?”

The flowers is around plenty and always are but spring? What spring? We just went from the depths of winter to full-blown summer. Spring didn’t even bother to stop by.

Folks who just a few weeks ago or so ago were complainin’ mightily about the coldest temperatures of the season were this week complainin’ about the heat.

You just can’t please some folks.

But the undeniable fact of the matter is that folks who think the seasons never change in South Florida just don’t know what they’re talkin’ about.

And you folks from up North who only spend a few months around these parts get this weather as a special treat. We prefer to keep summer weather somewhat of a secret because if everybody knew how nice it is around here in the summer they’d want to spend that season here, too.

As it is now, everybody thinks it’s dreadfully hot here in the summertime and, you know what? It is. It gets unbearable. You don’t want to be around here in the mosquito-riddled summer.

OK, got that?

Now, the truth of the matter is the summer weather is pretty dang nice: pleasant with a cool sea breeze blowin’ in off the Gulf and producing thick clouds about six or seven miles inland which tend to bring rain. When it’s sweltering up North, it’s comfortable here.

As the season progresses, the rains tend to crawl closer and closer to the coast until it reaches the point where most people set their watches — and their lives — around the daily shower at 4 or 5 o’clock in the afternoon.

Natives know to get off the golf course or the tennis court or the Gulf by late afternoon to avoid the lightning and frequently torrential downpours.

The ancients will tell you the lightning is a pair of twin boys who were scooped by the thunder when their mother was killed by a panther. They became men of thunder and learned to lash out when they became angry. When you see lightning flashing vigorously across the sky, the twins are really mad.

The Farmers’ Almanac tells you when the seasons officially change, but Florida weather doesn’t know how to read.

Around here, fall tends to start when the first cold front from up North makes its way this far south and winter arrives when they become a weekly occurrence and will last until the first cold front that never makes it this far south.

You nice folks from up North just keep on believin’ it’s too hot here in the summer. You don’t want to be here.

But as papa pointed out through Thomas Hudson in “Islands in the Stream,” the summer has fine weather when there are no storms.

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Steve Hart is a sailor, angler, explorer, raconteur, amateur citrus-grower and semi-professional theologian who masqueraded as a Florida journalist and pundit for the last 25 years. A fifth-generation Floridian, Hart comes from solid cracker stock but revels in the changing face of 21st century Florida and its patchwork quilt of people, their cultures, traditions, shades and ideas. His book, “Tales from Down Yonder, Florida,” is available in local bookstores and on the Web at www.downyonderflorida.com.