Winter Surprises

After the relative warmth of last weekend, this week's frosty temperatures are a reminder of how capricious and unforgiving winter can be. The following is adapted from a column I wrote back in 2006, with a few small changes.

Today is the first official day of winter as far as I’m concerned. Yesterday was the last day I could leave the house without taking my gloves and hat. By the time I walked home in the late afternoon, my fingers were stiffened like icicles and a cruel wind whipped around my hatless head. I can’t say I haven’t been warned – the leaves have been dropping hints for me for several weeks now, settling in piles around my yard. The gentle flowering plants have collapsed with cold exhaustion and only the evergreens are looking cheerful.

For someone raised in a warm climate, winter is no trifling season. It is a season that requires gear. To say gloves are essential is like saying plants need water. Unless you’re one of those people who won’t miss the use of their fingers for four or five months, I recommend a pair with weight – how about 40 grams of Thinsulate™? Winter isn’t a season that you can slip sideways into like spring melts into summer or summer congeals into autumn. Winter announces itself one afternoon, when you are least prepared, ready to give your left big toe to get a cup of steaming cocoa. Oh, wait – the left big toe is a little frostbitten, would the right one work? I’ve long believed that a real northeastern winter is not for the faint-hearted, like growing old isn’t for sissies.

The cold season is about long naps on grey skied afternoons, cauldrons of hearty soups bubbling like witches brew, and tumbling pell-mell down powdery hills wondering what happened to the bits of wood, aluminum and fiberglass that were once strapped to the bottoms of my boots. Winter demands respect, expects you to be man and woman enough to take it, shoving forward through gusts of wind that could snap the trunks of trees and keeping a stiff upper lip through days upon days of no sunshine.

Winter and I share a special kinship, we are the same color. Having been graded by the Color Me Beautiful cosmetic company as a “winter”, I can confidently wear navy and jet black, pure white or cherry red. When I learned of this propensity that seasons had towards color, I was deep in the 1980s, those days of NFL-like shoulder pads and feathered hair. I also lived in a warm climate. I felt about as alienated with a season as I have ever felt. Winter and I didn’t know one another.

I didn’t know the wonderment of being outdoors when the first snowflakes begin to fall, turning adults into children and children into puppies. I didn’t have an appreciation for the timeless black wool beret my brother gave me twenty years ago, or the way that even plain outfits can look like L.L. Bean if you have a great colorful scarf to wrap jauntily around your neck.

Now, I appreciate the warmth of a roaring fire as if it were melted gold and cherish those hushed silent days when everything is quiet, muffled by a trillion mounds of snow blanketing everything – even the old pile of rubbish that you forgot to throw out. There is nothing like a good all-night snow fall to cover all manner of sins committed by man or nature. It is nature’s way of saying, “hey, I’m beautiful too.”

I am happy to report that after more than nine years in the snowy white north of central New York, I am well acquainted with winter and it seems to know me as well, although every once in a while, it does give me a chilly surprise. And I hate surprises like that.