Damn you Winter!

Around five-thirty this morning, I looked out the window and saw white. Just as the trusty television weather folks had predicted, a winter storm rolled through overnight. It dropped some inches of snow, although about ten fewer inches than one sensationalist weatherman suggested might be possible a couple of nights ago.

It was a messy snow, the kind accompanied by fierce winds whose currents deposit drifts in a seemingly random pattern. Six inches here. Two feet there. Bare pavement over there. Some of that snow ends up stuck in the window screen and makes things look much worse than they actually are, but I could still tell it sucked.

But I did my duty and bundled up and went outside to shovel. (Yes, shovel. No snowblower here.) As soon as I started shoveling I realized that this was wet, heavy snow, unlike most of the powdery stuff we’ve had this winter. (Close to eighty inches of it, by the way!) And this wet, heavy snow, although nice for snowmen and snowballs, is a pain to shovel. Perhaps the only good thing about it is that it scrapes up from the sidewalk cleanly.

That’s what winter does to us. It forces us to look at the bright side of shoveling heavy, wet snow on a day that could have just as easily been seventy degrees and sunny.

The other thing that winter does is make us thankful.

There have been many cold days over the past few months when I’ve been outside with three layers of clothes, a frosty beard, and partially numb fingertips, trying to find a place to throw the latest inches of snow. The flakes came so fast and so often in weather so cold that I began to run out of room to put it. Piles at the end of my driveway grew taller than me, and a four-feet-high, twenty-feet-long snow wall separated my driveway from my neighbor’s. I watched the games in Sochi confident that if shoveling were an Olympic event I’d practiced enough to medal this year. 

Sometimes the only thing that kept me from becoming a less-crazy version of Jack Torrance (“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”) and stabbing at the mountainous piles of snow with my shovel while screaming obscenities was the thought that spring had to arrive sometime. And when it did, I’d enjoy it even more than in previous years thanks to the lousiness of this winter.

I think there’s something to that. Those of us who live in cold weather climates and have to suffer through months of weather forecasts that elicit such pitiful responses as “At least it’s only a few inches,” or “At least it’s above zero” enjoy the warmth much more than those who are in it year round.

Those jerks in warm weather locales don’t even appreciate what they have. “I’ve never seen snow,” they say, as though snow was a leprechaun and they had to see it to believe it. Well come on up, you warm weather wimps, and take a look at what we have here. Drive in it, shovel it, cancel plans because of it. Then maybe you’ll keep your mouth shut!

Winter is exercise. It’s what we have to do so we can enjoy summer, which is pizza and cheesecake. And we’re tougher because of it. We’re strong and lean and our pizza and cheesecake tastes better than theirs. They’re soft and lazy because they do nothing but eat pizza cheesecake. They do no exercise.

Figuratively speaking of course.   

It could be that I’m just jealous of warm weather places, but I don’t think so. I can complain about winter (hey, you do it to!), but even as I shiver in my car as I drive to get a gallon of milk at nine o’clock at night, I know that spring will be so much better because of it. Someday I’ll have the windows down and my arm hanging out as I drive to get that milk. The snow will be a distant memory. The reassuring scent of a distant skunk (an animal that has enough sense to spend the winter in a den and wait for spring) will permeate the air. The sound of cicadas and crickets will mesmerize me.

And maybe then I won’t be so angry at the warm weather people.

Until next winter.