When I was in school 50+ years ago, we all adhered to the notion that Ithaca was the second least sunny city in America behind Seattle. We all acknowledged that Ithaca was lovely in the summer, but most of us were busy elsewhere during that glorious season. So, to most of us, being in Ithaca meant we hunkered down to our studies and expected nothing of the weather to contribute to our enjoyment of life. Of course none of that was substantiated and I’m not even so sure that Ithaca weather was ever all that much different than the weather in the rest of the Northeast.
In actuality, Ithaca’s weather is definitely more challenging than much of the country, but it’s not dramatically worse than other parts of the Northeast and upper Midwest. Ithaca has a humid continental climate with cold winters where temperatures drop to around 17-28°F in January and receives about 80 inches of snow annually. The temperature typically varies from 17°F to 82°F throughout the year , which means long, cold winters but pleasant summers. The key challenges are heavy snowfall, with around 80 inches of snow annually, well above the national average (most of the US gets much less or no snow at all). There are also cold winters with about 51 days a year when temperatures stay below freezing, and roughly 10 nights per year drop to 0°F or below. There is limited winter sunshine with only 2.7 hours of sunshine in January on average (school is mostly not in session in January). However, despite all of this, Ithaca isn’t uniquely bad compared to similar latitudes. New York ranks seventh among states for snowfall, largely due to lake effect snow from the Great Lakes , and many places in Vermont, northern New England, and the upper Midwest deal with similar or worse conditions. The summers are, indeed, quite nice though with July peaking around 79°F with up to 10 hours of sunshine daily, and August, July and June considered the most pleasant months .
So yes, Ithaca’s winters are tougher than most of the country, but if you can handle the snow and cold, the area has distinct seasons and beautiful summers that many residents find worth it. The University always holds its reunions in early June. They need to squeeze this important event in between the graduation dates that are generally around Memorial Day and the start of the summer school sessions which start in later June. There is not much leeway, so reunion is always a bit at risk of questionable weather. Some years it’s hot and humid and other years it’s cold and rainy. This year, it started hot and humid and then quickly reverted to form and became cold and rainy. For many of us, this doesn’t feel so very different than we remember Ithaca, so no big deal.
That said, many of us gathering for reunion this year also spent some glorious summers here in the finger lakes and have very fond memories of those times. We lived in our otherwise vacant fraternity house during the summers and being one of those who lived too far away to not stay in Ithaca for the summer, I was in charge of the joint. Several of our gang were from the Ithaca area (Doug and Ann), so they were nearby anyway. Others like Gary, found reasons to stay for st least one summer (as an Art History major, I think he worked at the Johnson Art Museum). I seem to recall that Wolfert also spent a summer up here, probably fiddling with Biochemistry stuff. The two stalwarts of the summer scene were Debbie (who lived in Hawaii) and me (who’s home was Rome). I’m not sure I can recall what Debbie worked at during those summers, but I mostly did outdoor landscaping at the Plantations or ran the faculty tennis courts in Cascadilla Gorge. They were great summers with memories of fireflies and ice cream from Purity. I’m sure there was some bad weather too, but who remembers that?
The beauty of the human mind is that in the same way that it protects itself by not being able to remember pain, it tends to remember the good things and forget the bad. At least that’s what my brain chemistry does for me. I suppose that’s what coming back for reunion is all about. We want to momentarily recapture some of those golden moments of our youth to remind us that life was good to us. I know that I, for one, feel that my times in Ithaca in the early 1970’s were all good times (even though I’m sure they weren’t). There certainly were good summers, but there were also good inclement weather days during the school year. I think the whole learning experience and whatever stormy weather we associate with it was as much a part of my good memories as any of the soft summer nights. Those were our formative years. It’s when we launched ourselves toward our various purposes in life. It’s when and where our stories started to be written on our own clean slates as we let go of our parent’s already inscribed slates. And while we should all expect blue skies in our lives, we should all equally learn how to muscle through stormy weather to get ourselves to those blue skies. Ithaca was good at providing both parts of that equation to us.
Of the 15 of us gathered last night that attended Cornell, 8 of us were together from freshman year on. 9 of us were members of the same fraternity. Three of the couples have been together since those days. To put it mildly, there are bonds and memories that reach in every multilateral direction among this group that you can imagine. Like the characters in The Big Chill, there are relationships that go in every direction that may well bring up good memories and bad. But over the 50+ years, all that has faded into a tapestry of friendship that pretty much discards the bad and embellishes the good, as it should.
I found myself thinking about those who are no longer among us. It caused me to wonder who of us will be absent at the next big gathering. There is no point in such pondering because we will all get where we’re going in time and all that will be left are the memories of the good times that we shared. It is said that the past is prologue to the future. That’s a profound observation and comes from Shakespeare’s line from The Tempest. It captures something essential about how we understand time and change – that what has come before doesn’t just fade away, but actively shapes what’s coming next. It’s both comforting and unsettling, isn’t it? On the one hand, it suggests that we can learn from patterns and prepare for what’s ahead. On the other, it can feel like we’re bound by the weight of everything that’s already happened, whether in our personal lives, societies, or even just the accumulated momentum of our daily routines. I find it interesting how the quote works on different scales too – from personal habits that shape who we’re becoming, to how historical events create the conditions for future ones, to how even something like Ithaca’s geography and climate patterns create a kind of prologue for each winter that arrives. Sometimes those timeless observations hit differently depending on what we’re grappling with in the moment. and may even give us comfort and strength to carry on to the next.
So, as we wrap up our 50th Reunion tonight, let’s think less about the stormy weather that has followed us to Ithaca, and more about those warm summer nights ahead. Let that past be our prologue.