Sophomores Heidi Johnson and Lia Kaufman cuddle after a “chilly” morning meeting.
Sophomore Meg Grieve just returned to SCDS after living in Washington, D.C. for the last eight years.
Dear Sacramentans,
Sixty-five degrees is not cold.
I walked into school on a Tuesday morning in early September and saw what people should be wearing in the middle of January back east.
People were wearing coats, sweatshirts, long-sleeved shirts and long pants. Layers on top of layers.
Who wears a winter coat in September?!
At first, I wasn’t sure if something was wrong with my body that caused me not to feel the extreme cold, but nope. That’s just what people here do when it is below 70 degrees. Or, really, any time.
On the East Coast nobody puts on long pants until it is at least below 50 degrees. September is the time of year when you wear shorts and a T-shirt every day. You should never put on a sweatshirt, and how dare you put on a winter coat!
The average high in Sacramento during September is 82-89 degrees. That’s far from sweater weather.
The average high in Washington, D.C., in December is around 32 degrees. Now that’s sweater weather.
I wouldn’t hear the phrase “I’m cold” until December at the earliest, when it was below freezing.
Maybe Sacramentans start wearing coats in the fall to convince themselves that the seasons do change. But the harsh reality is that they don’t. Yes, there is a change in temperature from September to December, but I still don’t think it is necessary to pull out your winter coats in September.
Sophomore Meg Grieve, right, and her mother, Quincey, take their dog out for a walk on a snow day.
Although I like the cold, I admit that there are times when it is just too cold back east. Like during soccer practices in the middle of January when the turf was frozen and hard as rock. Or that time it took three hours to get home from soccer practice because people don’t know how to drive in the snow.
Or when we would have to shovel our cars out after snowstorms. And don’t forget about the old man next door, whose walkway we shoveled as well! And all those morning rides on a bus with no heat or properly closing windows.
During our first winter in D.C., three feet of snow fell, leaving little third-grade Meg pretty traumatized.
But I’ll never forget the first snowfall of the year in January, those glorious mornings when I woke up to see that school was cancelled and met up with friends for a long day of sledding.
So if you really want to wear clothes that people wear in Antarctica, please hold off until at least December when it plummets down into the 50s. And you might consider going to college on the East Coast to get a sense of what a real winter is.
—By Meg Grieve
