This is summer 2023. I looked at my driver’s license. It says State of Connecticut. I looked at the license plate on the back of my car. It says Connecticut. I drive by the Town Hall saying Hampton, CT. Then why are we getting Florida weather?

I was orphaned young, and my grandparents raised me. When Grandpa died at my age 14, Grandma and I had to move to Florida. Why? Because his teacher’s pension stopped when he died. Since he had a retirement plan from a city government, he was ineligible for social security, so there was no survivor social security for Grandma. She never worked a day outside the home her entire life, so she had no earned social security credits of her own. Property tax on Long Island was very expensive, so we left NY and moved to Florida, where she had built a tiny home on a lot she inherited from Grandpa in a giant subdivision. Once we moved into that Florida home, we were warned by neighbors about the weather. They told us that in summer every afternoon about 3PM there would be a big thunderstorm with lots of torrential rain and lots of lightening, and when that happened, we had to run around the interior of our house and unplug the TV, the radio, the fridge, the stove, the washer, i.e. everything we could unplug. Why we asked. The answer was that when lightening hit, it could kill anything still plugged in. Oh, they said, don’t bother getting a ladder and trying to unscrew your ceiling light bulbs. They’ll just explode. Which they did.

The part of Florida where we lived was tropical in climate. About 16 miles inland from Ft. Myers, which is on the west coast. On Long Island we had snow days and didn’t have to attend school. In Florida we had hurricane days, when we were sent home from school to help our families board up the house. By board up I mean, if you were rich enough to have a sort of metal awning over the windows, then you lower them and screw them in. If you weren’t rich enough to have that, you’d buy loads of masking tape and cover all windows with that so when the hurricane blows the window glass into your home, it will collapse onto your floor instead of spraying shattered glass into your body and furniture.

I remember shopping in Ft. Myers on a hot midsummer afternoon. All of a sudden, the thunderstorm started and dumped several inches of rain on the roads. I had to wade across the street to catch the bus home. My grandmother and I had a running bet going (not for money, just for fun). We would watch newcomers from the north move into this newly built subdivision and then guess if they would move back. Like us, none of them had ever been in Florida in the summer before. And guess what, all those family members and friends from up north did not come to Florida to visit you from April through October. Hotter than anything they had experienced before and humidity so thick you could cut it with a knife. The worse cold I ever got in my life I got in Florida. The doctor said that it wouldn’t go away until October, when we turn the air conditioning off. He was right. I inherited enough money from my father to pay for college, but I wanted some money for clothes and stuff, so after I graduated from high school, I got a job in a local motel cleaning rooms. They understood I was leaving in September to attend college. The doctor explained that the rooms I cleaned were 70 degrees, but when I stepped outside to fill the cart with the dirty laundry and move the cart to the next room, it was 95 degrees and very humid. Then I’m back into a 70-degree room again, and repeat the process along all the motel rooms. He explained that’s just too much strain on the lungs, so when you no longer have to do that, the cold will go away. He didn’t predict what happened when I got to Ohio for college. In October one day it was 50 degrees. I was the only person on a campus of 2,500 students who had to wear a winter coat to walk a mile to classes. Everyone else had a light fall jacket on!

Now here in Connecticut in summer, 2023, a lot of people have commented to me that they once lived in Florida, and this weather (too much heavy rain, high humidity and high temperatures) reminds them of Florida. My response has been that I feel that way too. If you follow the news, you know that the governor of Florida has been shipping immigrants he doesn’t want in his state to a northern state. I think that he managed to send us some Florida summer weather. We find that to be an immigrant we don’t want! How about this for revenge. We send the Florida weather back to him. Not in winter, but right now, when they are already suffering from heat and floods (and the four poisonous snakes in the U.S.). You can’t put weather on an airplane though. We would just need to funnel the governor’s own hot air behind the immigrant Florida weather. Invite him up here to CT, and he’s so full of hot air, that should move bad weather back there!

Angela Hawkins Fichter