As It Should Be

Zero degrees F right now on bright sunny January day. Tonight, 15 below F (that’s minus-26 for you Celsius fans). Nearly a foot of snow on the ground (that’s about 30 cm). Tires crunch on snow, birds sit fluffed on branches when not scrounging food. Breath comes out cloudy and hangs in the air, like fog; my daughter says her hair and eyelashes froze as she walked across campus this morning. She has a friend in New Zealand who insists people don’t really live like this. But we do.

I grew up in central Nebraska, where the wind whipped across the Rocky Mountains and over the flat prairie for a couple hundred miles, so winter storms charged in like a white stampede, wind whistling in even the best-made window frames, and hung around for three days, snow piling into drifts that reached nearly to rooftops. The county plow used to leave a huge pile of snow at the end of our T-intersection street and we tunneled into it; to this day I remember the pale blue light that reached within, the walls speckled with flecks of gravel like precious stones. We wore pathways into the snow where we walked to school. It had become simply part of life.

Twenty years later, in early March we were driving to my new job in western Nebraska, leaving eastern Nebraska in a light rain, which soon grew into a spring blizzard. After eight hours of crawling along the interstate highway, exhausted and desperate, we pulled into a motel 100 miles from home, having averaged 12 miles an hour. Next day all was clear and when we arrived out west we found green fields and people skeptical of our story of the storm. But it really happened.

Once out there I experienced the full blast of that area’s winter. One winter weekend the dog and I drove (me at the wheel) to Scotts Bluff National Monument, a huge limestone outcrop about 10 miles from home. I decided to circumnavigate the Monument by foot, and in doing so managed to fall into a ravine filled with snow higher than my head. No one knew I was there, so as much by desperation as design I clambered out, the dog patiently watching my struggle. We continued our journey, and came home cold, wet, tired, and content, having made another memory.

Now I’m in the upper Midwest, where snow drifts down like a bad case of dandruff, piling up quietiy and sincerely. At least when it does come, which is considerably less often now than in years past. And while it may be a stretch to say I like the cold hard fact of winter, I truly love it in the abstract. I want it to show up. Because it’s supposed to. I want to become accustomed to dashing from warm house to warming car to wherever, and back again, eyes squinting against the bright of sunlight off snow or trying to make out the road ahead as the car crawls along unplowed streets or slides through stop signs, even 4-wheel-drive and anti-lock brakes having difficulty making a go (or stop) of it.

This is how this life’s supposed to be, in season. I’ll welcome the warm spring ever so much more now, having come through a real winter.