the rix mix

Midway through January & winter arrives in New Jersey & the National Weather Service issues an advisory for parts of the state:

INTO EARLY THIS EVENING SOME ISOLATED FLURRIES MIGHT MAKE IT DOWN FROM THE APPALACHIANS ACROSS THE REGION. BRISK NORTHWEST WINDS AVERAGING 10 TO 20 MPH WILL CONTINUE. TEMPERATURES WILL CONTINUE TO DROP STEADILY THROUGH THE EVENING AND WILL FEEL MUCH COLDER.

Better stock up on milk? Even so, the longer range forecast for the next week predicts temps about average. Blizzards on the high plains, ice storms in the midwest, California's orange crop turned into frozen citrus-on-a-stick. Here it's the mildest winter to this point I can recall, even including a previous remarkable El Niño season in the late 90s when I planted my beach chair beside Raritan Bay on a January 1 & watched sandpipers that saw no reason to fly any farther south. This winter on the day after Christmas a friend & I startled a pair of Great Blue Herons on Sandy Hook's Plum Island where solstice tides had flooded a usually stagnant small pond into wetlands. They rose up, flapping their magnificent wings toward some more private sanctuary. "Wow," I exclaimed. "If we had been expecting that we wouldn't have been stomping around here & talking loudly about James Brown." He agreed.