I Winter in Florida
“I winter in Florida.”
When I lived in New Orleans, I learned that the word “costume,” obviously a noun, can also be used as a verb. I love this! I love that a place has such a thing in its vernacular. “I think I'll costume on Thursday.” Or, “I had to costume today because my regular clothes are in the wash.” Maybe it's because I'm not from The City that Care Forgot, meaning the language and attitude were learned in my adulthood, but the use of “costume” as an action word isn't natural for me. Therefore, it stands out as an interesting anomaly. So, when I hear the words for the different seasons, also obviously nouns, being used as verbs, I notice.
The pretentiousness of these expressions, the ones using “winter” and “summer” as verbs, is built in. I mean, the wealth needed to change locations seasonally has a built-in snottiness, right? Well not so fast, there!
I winter in Florida.
Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Sounds far prettier than calling myself a snowbird. (To which, by the way, I take exception. To the casual observer, I may appear very snowbird-like, but my wintering in Florida is a bit different. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.)
I also summer. Since beginning this nationwide adventure, I have summered in Maine, Arkansas, and South Dakota. This year, I will summer in Delaware. I find it tremendously curious that I don't spring or fall. I wonder why our nouns-as-verbs work for only two of the four seasons. Interesting! I did spring out of bed and fall to the floor when I woke up late the other morning, but that isn't the context I'm looking for here. There's no doubt that someone, somewhere has used “spring” and “fall” as seasonal verbs, but it apparently just didn't take. I can certainly understand why. Isn't language lovely?!
The beauty of wintering in southeast Florida is that it feels like the rest of the country's summer. The beauty of summering in those other places is that I can get the BEST of each location's climate/weather, but turn the key and roll on out before they get their worst. Sounds a bit selfish, I guess, to bail when the seasons change. Fair enough. I must say, though, that I am enjoying the freedom of living on wheels and chasing the sun as the seasons change. The line is often credited to Jimmy Buffett, but I picked it up from “Everybody's Talkin'” written by Fred Neil and sung by Harry Nilsson in Midnight Cowboy: “(I'm) going where the weather suits my clothes.”
Well, hell. Maybe I am a snowbird after all.
