February 2007

Winter

Every year at this time, I generally write a short column—it’s a short month—complaining about how unbearably long the winter has been and how sick to death I am of it by February.

This year, however, there seems to be little to complain about.  As I write, it’s a rainy spring day in January, and there have been few signs of winter as we have known it.  Tomorrow we could have snow, hail, locusts, or frogs, but today is warm and pleasant, albeit gloomy, like a bad day in Miami.

I have always hated winter; I grew up in Chicago, where the months when it wasn’t actually summer were a grinding ordeal.  In those days, snow began falling in October, stuck to the ground and stayed there, and continued falling until April, when the endless dripping would begin.  My neighborhood was never adequately plowed,-1 so a glass-like sheet of ice would form during the first snow, and subsequent snows would create new strata of frozen filth over that so when new snow arrived, it spread a heavenly whiteness over the landscape which was soon pockmarked with rotten leaves and craters of dog pee until that turned into slush, re-froze, and became a layer of dark ick over which new ick would then descend.

Some people probably enjoyed this, but to me, it was torture.  For some reason, until my hormones recently made some kind of adjustment and turned me into a normal person, I could never get warm, and I spent the first sixteen years of my life shivering until I had the sense to go to college in southern California.  My bedroom was on the arctic third floor of an old house, and when the wind blew, as it always did, the curtains fluttered.  I would sometimes go to bed wearing several pairs of socks, a flannel nightgown, two wool sweaters, and a pair of furry tiger-striped Dr. Dentons that my mom had bought in a thrift shop, yet I was still freezing.

For years, whenever I heard people complain about the heat in the summer and declare that they couldn’t wait till the nice cool weather returned, I thought they were crazy.  At age ten, I read a story by Rod Serling from The Twilight Zone in which the world was ending because of terrible heat, but then that turned out to be a dream, as most of Serling’s stories did, and the world was actually ending because of terrible cold.  I remember thinking, I’ll take the terrible heat, thanks.  I was always totally clear that just as some people are cat people and others dog people, I was a summer person.  The concept of the famed “Summer of Love,” whose fortieth anniversary we are about to celebrate, perhaps by reinstituting the draft, seemed perfectly apt to me.  You can’t imagine a “Winter of Love,” right?  One of my favorite movies as a teen was The Endless Summer, a documentary about two surfers who follow the summer around the world, looking for the perfect wave.  I thought that was an ideal way to spend one’s life. 

So you’d think I couldn’t be more pleased with our new subtropical climate, but in fact, it horrifies me.  Even Chicago no longer has those months of deep-freeze, and as for Maryland, at this point, the only time we’re likely to get any real snow is in July.  I was watching the news a few weeks ago when the temperature hit 70°, and as people cavorted in T-shirts on the National Mall, all I could feel was panic, like in the Rod Serling story, where it just gets hotter and hotter and hotter….But the people who were interviewed seemed delighted, and even the weather forecasters, who should have known better, were quite perky about climate change.

It turns out that I miss winter.  The other day, the temperature must have been about 30° when I went out one morning, and instead of hugging my down coat around me and shivering, I took a deep breath and savored it.  I’d never appreciated, growing up, the way cold air feels like a sip of ice water, just as delicious and refreshing.  Okay, not really cold air, the kind we used to have in Chicago where you had to breathe through a scarf or your lungs hurt, and if you sucked on the ends of your hair, they would freeze.  But classic 30° winter air—what a cocktail, I now thought.

Of course, I write this with the full knowledge that things could change any second—we could have “The Blizzard of 2007” tomorrow, though the greatest likelihood is that it will occur during the “Summer of Love” anniversary celebration this year in which, I’m guessing now, a bunch of old rock stars will gather on television and sing Jefferson Airplane tribute songs.  We live in a time that is not only interesting, as the saying goes, but wholly unpredictable—anything could happen at any time, to our weather, to our body politic, and to the thousand vulnerable points we have been so aware of possessing post-9/11.  George Bush could declare himself dictator and abolish Congress, or he could fall victim to his own hubris in ways that make Watergate look like a water-pistol fight.  We can only make cautious prognostications (you mark my words about this “Summer of Love Reunion” TV event) and then cross our fingers.

So as the ski slopes collapse and the polar icecaps melt, as shipping moguls exult at the opening of arctic shipping lanes, as the Canada geese fly in confused circles above us, let’s think back to all the winters of our shared pasts and appreciate those brief, perfect moments when fields of white covered the dog droppings and the tops of fire hydrants peered above drifts, and everything was clean and shiny and hopeful.

1- My fellow Hyde-Park-expats will confirm this.

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