There's Something Balmy About The Weather

Comes a summery day in January, like yesterday, and we are all reminded that good weather can make us feel weird and weird weather can make us feel good.

There is something not quite jake about incongruous weather. Midwinter balminess underscores the fear in atmosphere.

"I don't like it," said Mary Allen, 28, who was sitting on a bench in the sun. "I think it should be colder." Allen is a nurse at a medical center in Foggy Bottom, which wasn't. Foggy.

Mount Pleasant, on the other hand, was. Pleasant. "This is crazy," said construction worker Anthony Horlback, 42, who ate a sandwich and swigged iced tea at a park on Mount Pleasant Street NW. He was in a T-shirt, soaking up the rays. "It's cool, it's refreshing out here, you know what I'm saying. It's not cold. It's not hot and sticky."

At one Metro stop, Greenpeace canvassers did a brisk business, chatting up passersby about climate change concerns. "It's a global warming kind of day," said a young woman in a green windbreaker. The high downtown was 69 around 3 p.m., seven degrees shy of the 1907 record, according to forecasting centers.

Unexpected weather throws us off course. A young man in a heavy winter coat carried a skateboard up the escalator at Woodley Park. A woman in a short blue skirt and high black boots shivered on a street corner. Coffee shops were too warm inside, yet it seemed wrong to buy an ice cream cone.

"Why should people be miserable in good weather and happy in bad?" asked Walker Percy in his 1977 novel "Lancelot." His theory: Really bad weather liberates us. Good weather, in turn, spotlights our flaws.

Radio philosopher Garrison Keillor sometimes observes that the people of Lake Wobegon are unsettled and disturbed by pleasant weather, especially out of season. They feel like they haven't done anything to deserve it.

Some hope to gain from ungainly weather. A recent NASA study indicates that severe storms may become more prevalent as the Earth's climate warms. The Canadian magazine Profit suggests that anti-flooding construction companies will do well in the future. So will firms that cater to the logging industry, because warmer winters are leading to beetle infestations that alter the way lumber is milled.

Make hay while the rain falls.

Atrocious things can happen in good weather. The 11th of September, 2001, was a spectacularly crisp, blue-sky day. The calamitous post-Christmas tsunami of 2004 obliterated a clear, glorious morning.

Good things can happen in bad weather. We celebrate the rain in cinema and song -- "Singin' in the Rain" and "Rain on the Roof."

What was that yesterday: Weird weather that made us feel good or delightful weather that made us feel odd? Or was it both? Maybe we are hurtling toward a point of cosmic acceleration and compression when all four seasons will eventually be packed into every single day.

Everything, they say, is in the air. Why, even the Weather Channel may be up for grabs.