Wintertime - A Commentary

How do you know when you live in a place where the weather dictates how happy you are? For me it’s when I wake up to see my front yard covered in the kind of precipitation that they use a wooden ruler to measure. It’s never a good sign when I see the local meteorologist on Television using the word “feet” or “winter storm”. I’ve gotten to the point where I can read him: he blinks slowly and subtly bows his head just before delivering the proverbial knockout punch that we are about to experience another apocalyptic amount of snow and ice.

As a kid, I loved the snow - what little we got where I grew up - but now I hate, hate, HATE, it. Well, it’s not the snow, per se, but the ice it causes and the ability that it has to make a group of already less than mediocre drivers even worse. Remember the scenes in the movie versions of The Stand and I am Legend where you see abandoned cars strewn about the highway as their owners succumbed to their fates? Well, it’s something like that on the first morning after a snow storm - particularly if the plows haven’t had time to salt the roads yet - scary.

Couple that with everyone else’s love of the snow, and it’s enough to make you want wage war. The happy faces easily navigating the icy roads in their SUVs, equipped with fully-loaded ski racks on their way to the resorts at the top of some mountain where they will slide down it over and over - this is something they’ve looked forward to throughout the summer months.

Anyway, it’ll soon be over. The trees will get green again, the bbq grills will return from exile under their tarps or in their sheds, and skateboarders will once again don their extremely long, baggy shorts and commence to knocking old ladies off the sidewalks.

Then, two months later, it’ll be winter again. Maybe I should learn to ski.