It is easy to forget the nice things about winter in the middle of a deep freeze - because, in the middle of a deep freeze, there are no nice things about winter.
We are still recovering from various illness, I'm tired, the house is messy and I want to go outside but I can't because it is colder than my icy cold, miserable heart. I feel particularly grinchy about the weather when it can go from a pleasant +3 to -40 with the wind chill in the space of 24 hours.
Seriously, Old Man Winter, you can just go and take a nap for a bit while I try to thaw out.
Except, there are brief moments, on these freezing afternoons while rushing to your car from the safety of the house, that are exquisitely beautiful. Those transitory moments can be missed when you are bundled up to your eyebrows and walking quickly (but not quickly enough to cause windburn) to your car.
During those fast walks, take a brief second to cast your gaze upwards and take in the deep, blue sky - it is stunning. I am sure there is a science-y explanation for how blue the sky looks in our northern sky compared to the rainy-blah skies of the coast but I don't know what that is and I am too cold to bother researching the answer.
Instead, I imagine that these beautiful skies that we get in the minus holy-crap-it-is-cold weather is our reward for living here. The sunny afternoons that are sparkly and clear nearly make up for the fact that your nose hair freezes as soon as you walk outside and the groaning your car makes when you try to start it in the morning after you forgot to plug it in the night before. (As an aside, when you visit the coast, everyone thinks that your block heater plug in is actually an electric vehicle plug-in and that you are rich enough to afford an electric vehicle - not so, people, not so.)
Your delight at seeing the quarter moon and stars that appear at 8 a.m. in the vast and cloudless sky in the morning almost dampen your deep sadness when you realize that you should have put gas in your car on one of those mild days and now you have to stand outside freezing at the gas pump at -35. Really, these mornings are a gift. They allow you the luxury of a time-machine to see what you will look like with completely gray hair in ten or twenty years (let's be honest - at the rate I am going, it will be less than five).
Your formerly wet hair (because there is never enough time to blow-dry your hair in the morning) has clumped together in frozen dread locks that, I think, look quite fashionable. As your hair thaws, all of the static electricity that exists in the world will come to roost in your formerly luscious locks and you look frizzy, all day.
But, at least it is sunny some days and the sky really does look beautiful. It will warm-up again, as it always does, and we will be able to go sledding and have to cook hotdogs outside in the dead of winter.
I can hardly wait.
