A Letter

Dear Midwest,

These stunts you keep pulling? Yeah, not so funny. Really.

Are you mad at me or something? Are you taking your anger out on me? Because I'm thiiiss close to moving out. Yes, I will leave you if you keep pushing my limits.

In fact, I've teamed up with Thomas Jefferson and we're writing a Declaration of Independence. Should the situation arise.

It goes something like this:

I WHITNEY hold this Truth to be self-evident, that your Weather should be predictable, that it should not change drastically each day, that you should provide your citizens with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Heat, Dryness, and the Pursuit of Sunshine.

But when a long Train of Abuses and Nasty Weather, pursuing invariable the same Object, envinces a Design to reduce your inhabitants to tears, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to move the hell out of the Midwest.

A Short list of Grievances:

-YOU have of lately been surprising me with extreme changes in temperature. Why just make up your mind already.
-YOU snow over 8 inches in one evening. Then you add layers of slippery ice to make traveling and walking even easier.
- YOU then two days later decide to melt all of the snow and ice. Making for an extremely slushy, dirty, flooded mess.
- YOU create the thickest fog Champaign-Urbana has ever seen. While the news photographers love it, I find it hard to enjoy not being able to see a person coming at me until they're five feet away.
- YOU allow it to begin raining that same day. And allow it to continue for the next 36 hours.
- YOU must have thought it would be funny, to make this rain pour harder than I have ever seen. With unbelievable whipping wind. And extremely cold temperature. Just as I'm getting out of my evening class.
- YOUR actions broke my umbrella, soaked me from head to foot, forced me to try and run the 25 min. walk home in the flooded streets, where I literally waded my way through water up to my knees at an intersection on 4th street. All the while in the freezing cold. I nearly died.
- YOU then proceed to provide rain, snow, slush, icerain, and everything in between for the next few days.
- YOU in fact, on one day alone, rain, mist, snow, blizzard, rain, thunderstorm.
- YOU played a nasty trick this Saturday, warming up to 40 degrees! Students were wearing flip-flops, T-shirts, and loving it.
- YOU then today, drop the temperature to -15 degrees with windchill. When I of course have to walk to the library.
-THEY'RE saying you plan on snowing up to two inches tomorrow. Oh joy.

I WHITNEY, therefore, just an average MIDWEST GIRL, appealing to the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA for the Rectitude of my Intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good Midwestern folk, solemnly Publish and Declare, That I, of Right, can be FREE AND INDEPENDENT of your ridiculous antics, and move far away if I so choose.

Whitney Marie

So Midwest. Please shape up. I don't want to have to pull this out on you. I think our relationship could work. You just need to try a bit harder.

Love Always (at least right now while I'm inside with the heater on),
Whitney