No less an expert than Mark Twain once said, “If you don’t like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.”

Sometimes you don’t have to wait a whole minute.

Here in Maine, our winters are so long and our summers so short that we spend a lot of time not just waiting, but talking about the weather while we wait. People farther south know how to handle hazy, hot, humid days and have even developed whole warm-weather cultures based on heat. In Maine, we know how to deal with the cold, we know how to stay warm, but we have no clue as to how to be cool.

On these hot summer days, I’ve even found myself thinking about an article I read online recently. (It was on the Internet, so it must be true, right?)

The article was about cool places on Earth and began by asking, “Why is it ‘cooler’ at the South Pole than at the North Pole?” I began to feel cooler just reading it. I had to wander all the way to the end of the article to come across the answer, and it was hardly worth the journey. I’ll explain in a minute why one of our poles is cooler than the other, but first I have to explain something else.

I was planning to write a “warm weather” column but was distracted when I heard the chirpy guy on television say the temperature outside was an “unseasonably” warm 84 degrees. If the season is summer and summer is supposed to be warm, why is warm weather, even 84-degree weather, unseasonably warm?

Around this time, Mainers should expect our fair share of warm weather – even hot weather, for a week or two, which includes temperatures in the 80s and overnight temperatures that plunge into the mid-60s. We can also expect those King Lear-type thunderstorms that rumble overhead every other day or so, but we’re not prepared to like it. We don’t have the experience.

If you have friends in places like Boston and New York who want to flee to Maine to get away from the hot, sweaty masses of malcontented flatlanders they know as neighbors, you can expect about now to have them drop by any time and remind you that you always talked about having them come up to Maine for a visit sometime. Well, here they are. They’ll say they only stopped by to ask how you are, but would love to stay a week or two or three if possible. You, of course, invite them in but refer them to the plaque on your wall that says: “After two days, dead fish and house guests become unpleasant.”

Now, according to that article, the reason the North Pole – the one we’re nearest to – is so much warmer than the South Pole is because the North Pole has thinner ice that floats on the balmy waters of the Arctic Ocean. To get really cool you’ll have to head to the South Pole, which consists of mile-thick ice that sits on a very large, extremely cold mountain.

Just knowing that makes me feel good about summer here in Maine. Especially when the bubbly national weather guy tells me what the temperature is New York or Boston.

The best advice I ever got on weather was the following ditty I learned in school:

Whether the weather be fine,

Or whether the weather be not.

Whether the weather be cold,

Or weather the weather be hot.

We’ll weather the weather,

Whatever the weather,

Whether we like it or not.

John McDonald is the author of five books on Maine, including “John McDonald’s Maine Trivia: A User’s Guide to Useless Information.” Contact him at mainestoryteller@yahoo.com.