2 posts tagged “cold”
Contrary to my last post, I don't subscribe to the "God, why the #*&! isn't winter over yet?! WHEN WILL THE SPRING COME?!" school of thought. Some winter days are harder than others. Some make your eyes hurt from the cold, make you worry about your toes or cast you into a deep, unending depression (well, unending until the next ray of sunshine).
In general, though, I don't buy it. You can't afford to buy into it in Minnesota, where the winter lasts from October through April, where you think winter is over but it always comes back for a little more. The first year I lived here, we had a foot of snow on APRIL 27th. I had just returned from spring break in sunny New Mexico, and BOOM, a whole lot of cold, wet snow. Not until May has winter loosed her hold on us.
I've learned to love it. I really do love it; it's not just a facade I put up to make people think it's okay. Going outside when it is twenty below zero is not an experience I had as a child. I remember one year, when I was in elementary school, and it was seven below in Albuquerque. That, my friends, is cold. Especially in the desert. I remember it clearly. I remember the feeling of nature's power, I remember feeling the cold lurking outside the walls of our home. These days it's just another work day.
Winter is bracing. It wakes you the hell up. The land changes. Winter forces you to renegotiate your place, to relearn how to get to your destination. I have to take the corner out of our driveway into the sidewalk tenderly, since it has a slick, sloping cover of ice this year. You wake up and the world is swirling with new snow, or crusty and disgusting with the muck of cars driving by. Mountain ranges of old snow spring up in formerly verdant lawns.
This has been the coldest winter since I moved to Minnesota in 2001. I was used to one or two weeks of bitter cold, and many months of sort-of cold. This winter it keeps dropping down to zero, below zero, again and again and again. And that's all well and good. It feels right that Minnesota should be this cold. I want there to be polar ice caps, and I want Minnesota to be brutally cold in the winter.
I was going to write an entry about how I want spring to come already, and then I remembered the Art Shanty Projects two weekends ago. It's an amazing village that pops up on Medicine Lake every year, full of ideas and artists and hope. I realized that I love frozen lakes because the trees are farther away so you can see more sky. And they are desolate. And you're not really supposed to be able to stand in the middle of them.
At Medicine Lake, I wanted the winter never to end. I wanted to build my own shanty and live out on the ice. I wanted the desolate snow blowing across the ice, the unexpected slippery patches. The camaraderie you get from everyone else who is outside. The utter, painful joy of a grilled hotdog on a cold day--crispy bun, warm juicy center, eating it up before it gets cold.
Click below to see all my Art Shanty Project pics:
It finally got cold this week.
This morning I topped off my water bottle before I went to work. By the time I arrived 35 minutes later, my water was slushy with ice.
It's brisk! I kind of love it.
