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[1 March 1956]

Dear folks:

Since you are so interested in weather, I will say a little more about the weather here. We have tempered (if that is the word) by the Great Lakes. Like all bodies of water, these have a tremendous heat capacity and keep a more constant temperature than the surrounding land. However, surrounded as they are by the continent of North America, the lakes don't seem to have much effect on the climate unless the wind is blowing in the right direction. I understand that this is the reason for our dramatic sudden changes in temperature. The wind changes and we go from land to water temperature or vice versa. 

We had one of these Sunday. In the evening it was slushy and muggy, with a temperature in the neighborhood of 50. After we had been in bed for a while Doris felt overly warm and opened the bedroom window. In her sleep-befogged condition she opened it wider than she had intended to. Some hours later I awoke shivering with a bone-chilling wind whistling about my half frozen ears. The temperature, I found out later, had dropped to 5 above zero. The temperature in the bedroom was presumably somewhat higher than this, but at the time it didn't seem much higher. Gathering all my courage, I got out from under the blankets and closed the window. The next day Doris claimed that she hadn't been uncomfortable at any time during the night. 

Our thaws usually come on Friday or Saturday. This is arranged so that when we take our weekly shopping trip on Saturday--practically our only use of the car--our backyard parking place is a swamp and the car can only be extricated my much heaving, shouting, laying down of boards and gravel and rapid manipulation of the clutch and gearshift. So far when this happens we can park on the street, but in a month we will no longer have this privilege The local lawmakers, in an effort to find more parking places for commuters to the university area, have forbidden overnight parking on the street in this area after April 1.