wondering whether winter will win
Winter came back. A dusting of hard icy snow sits on everything. A layer of ice covers windows and sidewalks. Spring’s brief visit felt lovely, the warmth coaxed people outside to walk and run. I saw the flakes fall while I sat at the kitchen table sipping my tea. “Oh no!” I groaned. “What?” my wife said. “Look!” I pointed. My daughter shouted “hurray!” more out of contrarian personality (that’s my girl!) than out of actual enjoyment of winter, I think.
People who don’t live here tend not to realize how severe our winter is, in intensity or in length. It’s not this cold all the time but it’s predictably going to be this cold some time - twenty or thirty below zero is another world compared to zero, or compared to freezing. From freezing down to twenty below is fifty degrees. That’s the same jump from the low eighties down to freezing. At twenty below it’s less cold and more stinging, a feeling sort of like having tabasco sauce on the lips. That’s how it feels on the skin, in the joints and tissues it feels like an ache and tightness. Time-wise our winter is about a month longer than where I grew up. It starts two weeks sooner and ends two weeks later, and sometimes it’s even longer. That gets old. You can’t go anywhere without a winter complication to plan for. It changes going outside from a matter of stepping out the door to a matter of planning and deliberation - is it worth going outside for this? did I leave enough time to get all my gear on?
I have several Canadian friends whose winter’s even worse. They are legitimately quite hardy. I’m not. I hate this weather and would be happy to never live in it again. If you can call this living… At the same time it’s fun to brag a bit or to scoff at the winters of friends who live in what I like to call softer climates. This weather has definitely shaped my comfort in other temperatures. I figured out I can run outside in the teens, for instance, with minimal planning and preparation. My brother bikes year-round, it makes him feel tough and well-prepared, it’s a bit like beating God in a staring contest.
Weather provides an easy point of conversation with strangers, especially in transit - at bus stops, or at kid events near the coat rack while pulling kids’ boots off and stuffing their hats down coat sleeves. Long term residents compare past winters to this one. Everyone commiserates, it’s so bitter out today, I almost slipped on the ice, and oh that biting wind… It makes for quick camaraderie, we all endure this hardship, we all gripe but throw up our hands, and look to spring.
False spring is a dirty trick and if I were religious I would curse some deity, I almost want to convert in order to have someone to blame. Our hopes go up and our defense go down. It feels good to go outside again, moving around is so lovely, maybe I’ll go for a run, or let’s just take a walk to the bakery. By late winter I’m a bit stir crazy from less activity and the accumulated weight of the days hunches my shoulders and grits my teeth, but all that tension also makes me prepared for the winter life. False spring undoes that preparation. Winter slams back into town and it’s the shock of the season’s arrival all over again and why, why do I live here?
We are likely not staying here so I may get a chance to live away from such a winter. Our summers are too hot and humid too, the spring too wet and stormy once the honeymoon of not-winter wears off, really only the fall feels good consistently but it consistently feels so very good. Likely wherever we wind up will have a bad season, but it may not be so extreme as here. If we stayed I wonder if I could adjust, learn to find the fun in the intensity of this climate - buy some snow shoes, take up cross country skiing or ice climbing.
I associate a sense of yearning with our weather, and it’s in a lot of the music that I gravitate toward, a kind of diffuse frustration that things in general aren’t very good and a vague hope that things might be good. This foggy frustration and hope is punctuated with clear moments when something fucked up happened and when something awesome happened, and good weather is often a symbol for the awesome moments - a warm day in early winter, palm trees, these images speak to me. I wonder if that sensibility comes from the climate. It makes sense (though of course there are other sources as well); who we are comes in part from the hardships and obstacles in our lives. If so, would leave if I lived elsewhere, or am I set now, my patterns set in place like hardened clay? I expect it’s a bit of each, that these patterns would persist but soften over time, and new ones fall into place. The past is a weight that pulls us in a direction but weights can lessen and new weights can be added as counterbalance.
I grudglingly admit the snow falling is pretty when viewed out the window. I work several stories up. Seeing the patches of white covering lawns and trees and buildings has a certain charm, and the falling snow always makes me think of science fiction movies - ships traveling through space, stars becoming moving lines of light instead of fixed points. That in turn reminds me of bonfires as a teenager, drunk on existential wondering and the feeling of deeply knowing someone for my the whole time that I’ve been me, laying on our backs and looking at the sky. Staring at or through a snowfall I like the static-like rhythm of background flakes falling with the odd bigger or brighter flake popping out as an individual momentarily.