An awareness of standing on concrete. Pavement. Grass. Mud. Hard-packed well-traveled dirt even. I would become consciously aware that I was standing. That I was living. It always seems to hit out of the blue in the two seconds of silence before the next song begins.
Maybe that was how I decided I hated snow. I wanted to be on the ground.
In any case, the feverish disdain for blacker days here that I was warned of a thousand times over has not hit, and I am still cautiously inclined to point out it's the snow and the cold that I can't stand, and really having grown up on a rainy damp coast I'm well-suited to life as a duckling. My feet might be webbed. Water might bead on my hair. I imprint easily, if you have a beard and a smile for me.
My fingers have not split. My hair has not dried out to hay-status. My body has not degenerated into a battleground of hives and eczema and extreme crackled dryness. My mind has not shut down in the cold, bereft for lack of music on the worst days because my phone (any phone) ceases to operate at those temperatures. Instead I can pick out pretty shirts that will show (AKA without sweaters!) and run around the house and porch in bare feet for the entire day if I want and I won't feel a chill. The heat in this house has not made it over 57 and we haven't noticed if it's even on, half the time.
When the dark closes in I light candles and reading lamps and sometimes have a fire in the fireplace. When the rain pours I make sure we have a few backup umbrellas and the other day I laughed out loud when I went to shrug into my winter coat only to realize how warm it was and I went out in jeans, a t-shirt and a hoodie instead. The hoodie wasn't even zipped up. Everyone I met was treated to a whole enthusiastic depiction of the fact that It's January! We don't need coats! Can you believe it! And they shrug and laugh at my excitement and tell me I will get used to it. I practically skip down the road now. You would laugh.
I have mastered driving in night-rain. I have solved most of the problems with wet feet. Instead of extra gloves and sweaters, the children carry extra socks in their daypacks and we buy very good rain boots and umbrellas to keep the rain an arm's length away. I have all but dimissed worries involving freezing to death and I'm almost grateful for the damp air to breath when we aren't well, because dry air has a tendency to bring the colds and keep them in our lungs.
With Ben still very sick it is easy for me to head out in search of juice and soup and cough drops and nyquil without him worrying about me driving on ice and I've already forgotten the description they used to use for when the snow packed down hard and glossy and they would have to bring in the big cats and dumptrucks and carve down to the road level again so that people could actually enjoy brakes when they drove instead of drifting right through stop signs, despite that top speed of five kilometres an hour. Was it gloss? No, I'm pretty sure I would have remembered that.
I believe the snow was weighing me down, frankly. It looks so innocent and beautiful. Special, individually. No two are alike. But then it forms a gang and chokes off the flowers and the life visible for miles and you wear it on your being in the form of layers of wool and silk and gortex and thinsulate and you curse your feet as they slip out from under you and you breath out fog that contains epithets of misery and everyone pretends they are all in this together when really you have been standing on the fringe trying desperately to escape into your head for so long now you can only tell the difference between the place inside your head and the one outside by the presence of snow.
I'm putting snow into its place in my life now. It dusts the tops of the majestic mountains that surround me with a pure white coat of icing sugar. It beckons to come play and then leave it behind again. It's a Bob Ross touch painted with a number five brush dipped in a swatch of titanium white, left to dry on a canvas of fantasy and that's where I'm leaving it today. The lowest low through the end of January is slated to be three degrees and I am jumping for joy.
