Falling, indeed

Unlike most years here in central North Carolina, temperatures have been colder than normal and our first hard frost occurred this morning. The above photo from November 24th last year, shows the glory of our lone non-native tree to survive The Culling, a.k.a., the landscaping project of 2024-25. This year it still retains red leaves but they are dulling. Dogwood, which in years past held onto their dusky maroon-colored leaves, now stand bare, attesting to the weather with a solitary leaf here and there. Plants closer to the ground now are yellowing and soon will follow the trees.

On the personal front, fall seems an apt term the past two years. At this time last year we were winning our battle against Covid, entering our third week in its grip. This year a Covid-like virus laid me low all of October 26th through November 2nd, and its nasty little cousin showed up yesterday, an intestinal thing. (“Detestinal” thing?)

Dry, sunny weather accompanies these low temperatures, providing a yin to the biting yang of it. Our bird world changes almost overnight: the year-rounders come back to the feeders to start bulking up, others disappear, and soon birds of prey will become more prominent on their leafless perches. Last week a raven lingered in front of the house, a surprising sight.

This year brought an unusual amount of treework in our near neighborhood. Trees and large limbs fell frequently during unusually rainy weather this summer. Fearful homeowners culled trees simply because they stood near the owners’ houses. A red oak ‘shared’ with our neighbor—it has managed to grow across the property line—dropped a limb the size of a small tree onto the neighbor’s driveway in a spot which had held a car until a week or two before the limb fell. Our good friends around the corner were not so lucky, losing a vehicle when a limb fell on a minivan about six weeks ago.

NC weather continues its wonderfully contrarian ways, at least to born, bred, and experienced Northerners (a.k.a. “Yankees!” as the Southern epithet is uttered). Temperatures promise to level out and this coming weekend will rise as high as 76. Any day after Halloween which promises temperatures in the 70’s (let alone the 60’s) seems to be a gift, even after living here nearly 20 years. And the most anticipated weather event for the coming months? The knowledge that someday in our near, winter-weary future, a singular weather pattern will convince a 70+ degree day to appear in late December or January. Always a welcome respite, even if its appearance always remains a cameo.

Mild

Morning sun strikes leaves of American (Carolina) beech–at least that’s what my plant ID app says. The temp was cool but not brisk around 8:00 a.m. September 2025.

Our weather this summer has been a bit topsy-turvy to me. June’s usual onslaught of highly humid, hot days which normally starts after my birthday on the 8th, arrived instead in the final days of May. July, a month that has seen weeks-long streaks above 100 was hot again but avoided the triple-digits. The official high temps, nevertheless, hit the 90’s every day but two, and we started to collect our normal rainfall (in fact, a little extra).

August, though, should have continued the hot weather and brought some brushes with tropical storms. Instead, the month opened with a high or 86, then 79, and high temps stayed in the 70’s six more days after that. We collected over 5.33 inches of rain in the first 11 days. The entire month easily bested our normal rainfall total 7.99 inches versus 4.71 inches. We saw the 90’s only once, on the 17th, when the thermometer got to 92 while we were in Belgium. The weirdness continued when the humidity broke weeks early—usually it’s the second week of September—and overnight lows descended into the 60’s and 50’s never to rise above 70 again as I write this on the 12th.

As mentioned, September normally sees the departure of high humidity and the extension of lovely days in the 80-85 degree range. Instead, we started with lows in the 50’s and high’s in the 70’s except for a four-day streak of 84-94. Things dry out in the rainfall department normally, too, with the usual rainfall being about two inches. We’re on pace for that.

Even the tulip poplars think it’s weirder. Normally they start to get stressed in July and drop a lot of yellowed leaves. This year, only a smattering fell then and continued through August. When the way cooler temps of September came, they acted as if we’d crossed the equinox, nights were getting crisper, and large numbers began to fall: not yellowed this time but a leathery brown. IT’S NOT FALL YET, I want to scream at them, but by most measures we are crossing that threshold now, not in early to mid-October per my observation of usual.

I had thought the broad strokes of climate changes meant an accented version of our normal curve: hot months would be hotter, cold months would be a little more mild, and we would see more rainfall here in the American Southeast. I did NOT expect we would just take all the normal readings, throw them in a hat marked “Your Weather,” and pull them out randomly!

At least the blossoms have come out on the roses of Sharon, but they are later this year. Contrary to the wishes of my native plants landscaper, I will not be removing all of these beauties, aggressive invaders though they be. (Honestly, they’re growing under a porch, behind the garbage bins, anywhere and everywhere.)

Humidity

Second from left=outdoors. Raleigh, NC. June 2025.

The photo above shows the indoor and outdoor temps/humidity before the heat dome here in Raleigh slightly broke. My indoor display for my rudimentary weather station tells the tale: it’s less than 45 minutes since sunrise. Outdoors on the deck immediately behind my living room it’s already in the 80’s and the humidity at that temp is still 83%, which boggles my mind given that it’s a relative humidity indicating how much moisture the air could hold. It implies the dew point is in the mid-70’s. And disturbingly, this usually runs below the official temperature a few miles west of here at the airport. The deck is shaded, the sensor is located up by the house, and our neighborhood boasts many tall trees unlike the openness of the airport environment. The A/C had been running all night, hence the basement temperature (on the far right) reading less than 65 degrees. The other two temps are in upstairs locations. Welcome to the Southern Summer, boy!

Catching up

It’s been a lengthy stretch of sporadic posting at best. I’ve excused it with “spending time with my wife” and “getting things done” which certainly sound worthy. We’ve just returned from attending her mother’s funeral. (More on that later.) A slate of urgent tasks demands my attention, as does maintaining my health, both physical and mental.

A few pieces of writing, stubs and nothing more, await more attention than I can manage right now. Today let’s just review the two-plus weeks since I posted a hawk in our front yard. Hawks continue to drop by, a vivid affirmation to our decision to rip out the front lawn and install native plants—and especially to my decision to let the leaves lie where they fall. The leaf cover has fostered those little grubs and bugs birds like eat and extends to small rodents for the hawks.

Sadly, rodents (squirrels) ripped into the blossoms of our star magnolia. This is as good as it ever looked this spring:

Star magnolia in the middle of March, 2025.

Perhaps the false starts to spring affected it? We had days in the 70’s and hit 80 once before cold weather set in again, complete with dustings of snow and some freezing rain. The cold became brutal for North Carolina, dropping into the teens. This delayed the magnolia’s blooming by two weeks or more. It looked like this last year, weeks earlier:

Reposted from 2024. Star magnolia on February 29, 2024.

We revisited the Duling-Kurtz Country Inn in Exton, PA, Sunday evening. Sitting up by the fire that evening pleased us both. Dressing for the funeral in this room made things marginally better than performing the same in a generic Hilton or Marriott property.

The Winston Churchill Room at the Duling-Kurtz Country Inn. The sharp-eyed viewers will have noted the presence of TWO bathrooms. Two very small rooms were obviously turned into one. The door to one room no longer being needed (center), it was turned into a closet. March 2025, Exton, PA.

We’re on the eve of a personal holiday, Opening Day of Baseball. The joy baseball brings will temper the immediate sorrow of losing our last parent. This year promises many highs and lows, a challenge from start to finish. “May you live in interesting times.” Indeed.

Winter, NC-style

Two white-throated sparrows survey the slim pickings of food. Jan 22, 2025.

Prior to moving to North Carolina, my definition of winter used the words “cold” and “icy” and “snow”. I’ve had to redefine that, but in unexpected ways. Those words still pertain but in lesser roles. In fact, snow only made cameo appearances the past two years. (I acknowledge I’ve now jinxed us for a multiple-inch snowstorm before February ends.) The photo above documents the approximately one-inch snowfall we received a week ago today. Prior to that no measurable amount had been recorded here since January 2022. (“Measurable” as defined by the National Weather Service records. I only examined records for Dec-Feb backwards until I found some because I don’t think we’ve ever had snow in November or March this century.) After a trace fell on the 16th and 17th of January that year, we received two inches on the 21st and 22nd. On the 23rd another inch fell.

All of this seems manageable to the historical Me living inside my head, but we’ve succumbed to a combination of the contagious fear of the locally-raised and Old Folk Fartism. We generally just stay home when any measurable amount of snow falls. During the eight winters we’ve lived in our current house, only one has recorded a “real” snowfall, defined completely subjectively as “about four inches or more”. It fell December 9th, 2018:

Nine inches of snow. Dec 9, 2018. Raleigh, NC.

Although Raleigh has experienced significant snowfalls in the past quarter century, the real snowstorm fell in February 2014. This local TV news account tells it better than I could. It dropped less than four inches of snow, but just imagine a nice topping of sleet and a city of nearly 200,000 people, none of whom have put snow tires on their cars. Raleigh has hills: not steep hills, but steep enough that folks just abandoned their cars when they got stuck. Click through to the article–if you live in the northern half of the US, you won’t believe it.

There have been others–in 2000 nearly two feet of snow fell, and nine to ten inches fell at Christmas in 2010–but the salient feature of winters here is that at some point between December 1st and the end of February you will get at least one day at 70 degrees or above. Thus, winter here compares to a streaming series with six to nine episodes; winter in the north compares to a traditional network series of twenty or more. You still get the drama, but it’s over soon. Last week’s one-inch snowfall started with freezing rain. Low temperatures and shaded streets made it a bit slick for days, but today marks the beginning of highs in the 50’s and 60’s. And yes, one forecast (Foreca and the European model ECMWF) says we’ll hit 71 on Friday.

I rest my case.

Finland or Turkey?

Melting on a mid-July afternoon. Benny, left, and Charlie enjoy the heat sinking into their bones. July 2024.

You know you’re in the sauna and That Guy insists on pouring ladle after ladle of water on the hot rocks? Your ‘dry sauna’ experience is turned into a nostril-searing cross between a Turkish steam bath and the original intent of the high-temp Finnish experience? Yeah, that’s our past week or two here in Raleigh, NC. The photo above captures Tuesday the 16th when we were somewhere around 100 degrees and the relative humidity made you feel like a water-soaked towel had been removed from a vat of boiling water and then wrapped around your body. I’ve been in worse–I’m looking at you Kansas!–but this turns most days into hot temperature versions of Snow Days, especially when a thunderstorm might occur.

Why two fur-encased creatures would want to spend hours melting into the planks of the deck in this weather boggles my mind. In No Banners, No Bugles by Edward Ellsberg, the Rear Admiral opens his book of World War II ship salvage with a description of him and his crew attempting to raise ships in the Red Sea where the temperature is in the 120’s (Fahrenheit). He goes back to his apartment and the poor A/C box unit has only been capable of cooling to 92 degrees. Nevertheless, it raises goosebumps on him due to the 30-degree temperature differential. I felt the same when I walked into a house being cooled to about 78, 79. (Ellsberg’s book is surprisingly readable and would make a good movie. I am not much of a history buff, but this book really held my interest when I read it.)

Benny got smart a day or so later, and spent his days in the basement where the temperature never gets higher than 70-72. Charlie finally succumbed today. He spent the afternoon in my office right up until I said I was posting this. Apparently he’s shy? Embarrassed? Ambivalent?

Why I like NC (weather version)

After living my first 51 years above 40 degrees latitude in the northern hemisphere, my wife and I moved to North Carolina. We entered the state on January 27, 2006. It was 72 degrees Fahrenheit. We didn’t realize at the time this would occur annually but would not occur daily throughout “winter”. Every year December, January, and February will grace us with a day, maybe two of spring-like temps. Today is one of those days. A dozen days ago as we woke to a winter-typical 32 degrees, a fire seemed the way to go. Today I found it too warm to wear a sweatshirt while working in the yard. A week from now our lows will be in the 30s, our highs in the 40s. This kind of winter I can live with. Tampa where my sister-in-law just moved? No. Their “warm spell” is 80-82 degrees for a few days before dipping to 65 and settling into the high 70s. I like a cooler reset–I just don’t need weeks and weeks hovering near freezing with snow, ice, sleet, and all the treacherous driving it brings. I don’t need the bone-chilling cold of the Puget Sound where the high will be 38, the low 33, and fog will be punctuated by rain. If you can, imagine the opposite of a steam bath–lots of humid atmosphere driving the coldness deep into your joints. I don’t need the snow to fall on November 5th and stay on the ground to mid-March as it did in Spokane from late 2000 to early 2001.

No, I’ll stay here: inland from the storm surge of hurricanes, protected from most of the tornadoes spinning up from Gulf air collisions, humid enough to have only sporadic forest fires, and situated on tectonic plates content to move seldom if at all. And winter warm-ish. Nothing more.

Storm damage

Leaning Tower of Cypress. Raleigh, NC. January 2024.

Storms have ravaged the country this past week. Still do. Four days ago I discovered the easternmost Leyland cypress in a row of them had taken a tumble from the stiff winds we endured Tuesday night. If you’re thinking, “hey, Leyland cypress, that sounds like a cool tree to grow” do yourself a favor and find out about their root system, their gangly nature, and whether they’re meant to be grown in your climate region. The folks we bought the house from (or maybe the folks before them) didn’t. To quote Wikipedia:

…because their roots are relatively shallow, a large leylandii tends to topple over. The shallow root structure also means that it is poorly adapted to areas with hot summers, such as the southern half of the United States.
Wikipedia, “Leyland cypress”

Theoretically they should die within 10-12 years in North Carolina. And hey, are you thinking, “Well, I live in the north so it would be okay?” How about this add-on: “In northern areas where heavy snows occur, this plant is also susceptible to broken branches and uprooting in wet, heavy snow.“

We’ve owned our house for almost seven years. The folks before us, about eight years. Using the timeline feature on Google Maps Street View, I can see that the row of cypress were planted as early as 2011 underneath larger trees which then were removed at a later date. These cypress grow really fast, like one-meter-per-year fast. All I’m saying is…13-15 years and these trees are doomed. I wish the black fence there at the bottom wasn’t holding it up. I could have used a chainsaw to take care of this myself. But for a sense of scale, consider that the branches I would need to limb (so I could cut it down safely) are the ones just up the trunk from the black fence and that’s 5-6 feet above the ground. I would be holding a chainsaw at face level and over my head. Not gonna happen. Instead I’ll pay hundreds of dollars for some professionals to do it.

Did I mention I hate these trees? I do. There’s a whole row of them planted as a property screen by former owners of this house. We parked our car Mr. Lincoln beneath them, and I cursed a lot from all the sap and tannin-juice I had to wash off the top of the car. Percy the Aviator gets parked in the upper part of the driveway where he isn’t underneath them. They’re ugly at eye level. You can see from the photo above the tree has no branches on one side of it, the side which faces its nearest neighbor–yeah they planted them too close together too. Here’s most of the rest of them (four of six):

A row of disasters waiting to happen. Raleigh, NC. January 2024.

You can see my eye-level view here: nothing but bare branches which do nothing to screen me from the neighbor’s house to the south. (That’s it in the background of these photos.) You also can see I’m about to lose another one. That one in the center leaning way in. The only beings who like these trees are the large number of birds who use it as cover from the Cooper’s hawks so they can safely hit my bird feeders just across the driveway, and the squirrels who of course just go where they want to.

In December 2018 I lost my first one. There were two in the backyard. My guess? Whoever bought and planted these had more than they needed for the driveway screen and said to themselves, “well, where should we plant these two?” They wound up, incongruously, between the azaleas in the bottom left of the photo above and my tool shed. In fact, you can see the one which still remains on the left side of that photo there. We caught 9 inches of wet snow in early December that year. I knocked a lot of snow off of the branches, a successful attempt to save them from breaking. (In fact, I think one of the worst hit trees was the one now lying on my fence.) What I couldn’t do was save the Leyland cypress in the backyard which bent down nearly to the ground. Apparently I didn’t take a photo of it.

Friday’s wind dealt far less damage. Those of us on the North American continent know we’re in for a lot of intense storms this winter. Hope y’all ‘weather’ them better than this!