THE BIG FLORIDA FROST

It has been a generally cold winter here in sunny Florida. But it was the recent hard frost on January 22, 2009 which caused a lot disruption and for heads to turn. Many of the cold-sensitive plants people unwisely plant too early in their home gardens, like poinsettias, and pansies died on that day. Several hotels along Beach Boulevard stripped bed sheets off their clients beds to cove their outdoor beds of pansies on nights with frosts predicted. The graceful and frost-sensitive larger plant is the banana. They grow tall and green and are popular in gardens. Most winters they loose only a few outer leaves which turn brown and drab, but by March, new green and vibrant growth is back again. But this winter many of the older banana plants, some tall enough to have little bananas hanging among their leaves, froze that cold morning in January and then by the next day, the entire plant had turned an ugly brown.

A few weeks after the freeze, I was driving in a friends car when he committed a very minor traffic infraction. My friend had to submit a traffic report to a policeman. Involved only as an observant passenger I had time to snoop around. After the preliminaries, while we were standing near the patrol car waiting for the officer to complete a report he had clipped to his clipboard, I noticed that the windshield on his vehicle had many prominent scratches on the glass of the driver's side. They were enough to obscure the driver's view. I asked him about them. (After all, I once had to pay a sizable fine for having a similar vision-obscuring crack across my driver's window.)

The office paused and explained that he had to scrape away a thick layer of ice on the morning of the "big frost." By way of excuse, he added," I never have had a frost on my windshield before."

"But, he said, pointing to the scratches and then to his clipboard, "now I know I shouldn't use a metal clipboard to scrape ice off glass--I won't do that again," he laughed.

"No, no no clipboards, 'at's no good," said m friend, who hearing the conversation turn to ice, and who comes from New Hampshire and who knows a lot about ice...but less about Florida traffic laws, felt the need to offer his opinion. He added, "Your best bet fer that kind of ice is a plastic credit card." The officer nodded appreciatively.

"What about those plastic ice scrapers for cars," I asked, my eyes closing down into narrow slits, "didn't you have one of them?" I persisted, my mind still focused on that old ticket I had to pay.

"Oh!, them things?" he snickered, "folks down here, when someone gives them one, they jest bring 'em inside and use 'em to clean out their cat's litter box! We just never have any experience of real ice, before this."

Well, today the temperature was in the low 80s (F) and Home Depot in St Augustine put out a giant display of frost-sensitive plants..like tomatoes, herbs, poinsettias, and and succulent flowers.

I don't think we will see any ice more down here again-- not this year. Finally, it has warmed up and the weather is pleasant. But that 28 degree (F) "great Florida frost" has taught a lot of people a lesson. Perhaps change is really on the way. That Florida frost might be just one sign that the earth is on the cusp of some drastic climatic disruption. But we can't tell now for sure by just a few observations---only time will tell. A big Florida frost in sure to get people thinking though.