Every year about this time, along with most everyone else here in the great north woods, I get royally sick of winter.
Over the years I’ve tried to figure out just where the irritation comes from. I know it’s not just snow. The view out the window is beautiful. Sparkles of refracted light glitter like scattered diamonds. The sight of a snow-laden pine takes your breath away. Colors grow sharper against the backdrop of white. A feeling of peacefulness comes in the wake of new-fallen snow, a pleasant muffled silence, as if the world is resting. True, you can get a little tired of shoveling or plowing the stuff, but the same is true of cutting grass or raking leaves.
For some years I thought the real culprit was the cold. Only a polar bear could really enjoy 40 below. But then I started paying attention to how many nights the temperature actually got down past 15 or 20 below, and realized there aren’t that many. Given the clothing and footgear available these days, there’s no reason to feel uncomfortable on most winter days or, for that matter, nights.
So if it’s not the snow and it’s not the cold, what, exactly is it?
The length of the season, for one thing. In much of the rest of the world, the seasons are roughly three months apiece, each one taking a fourth of the year. Here, of course, we joke about having eleven months of winter and one month of bad sledding. But beneath that wild exaggeration there lurks a hidden iceberg of truth. Here the seasons are skewed into disproportion, with winter taking roughly half the year and the others left to share the remainder.
Given this fact, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that winter’s chores and challenges occupy far too much of a sane person’s life. I mean, how many repetitions of thawing a pipe or scraping a windshield or shoveling a walk or lugging in sticks of firewood does it take before your normally healthy mind begins to whimper? One of the time-tested tactics of torture is to drip water on a person’s head. Each drop is harmless. Cumulatively, the drops grow ever more ominous, and eventually take on enormous psychological force, until the victim’s will to resist is destroyed.
That, I think, is the real danger of a north woods winter: too many little things repeated over and over and over. Far too much of the same old same old. A few too many drips on the old noggin.
What to do?
Break the pattern. Interrupt the drips.
Watch a movie. Break out the snowshoes. Start a brand new book. Drive to Duluth. Write a long letter to someone you haven’t seen for a long time. Make an overseas phone call. Pack up the family and hightail it to a local motel, ideally one with a swimming pool.
Get creative. How about an outdoor picnic, with a little bonfire and roasted hot dogs and a pot of steaming beans? A toboggan party. Some outdoor baseball with a Nerf or Whiffle ball. A sleepover with friends, where you rest during the day and stay up all night talking. Pasting photos in a scrapbook. Anything to break the rhythm.
And, of course, if all else fails, there’s always the possibility of a last-minute trip to someplace south.
Anywhere south.
Anywhere.
South.
