A Cold Day

 

The Prairie/Tundra of my Backyard

It is the coldest day of this winter season.  It is 15 degrees Fahrenheit at 10 am but only expected to rise to 18.  It will be even colder the next few days with negative lows by the weekend.  Many will complain about this blast of cold, either wanting it to go away or talking about escaping to Florida to get away from it.  Not me.  I love a good spell of cold like this.  I actually look forward to them and like them more than the hottest humid days of summer.  I have reveled about this in previous posts.

• January 2005: Winter Survival

• January 2014: Brutalmente Frio!

• For the Love of a Good Winter Blast

• The Vortex Cometh

• A Walk in the Frigid Cold

I like the seasons.  I like them all.  I don’t like that the average temperature of each season is rising and contributing to wild swings in the weather and redefining what the seasons are and are not.  I can see where I may someday live in more temperate maybe even tropical climes.  Maybe the fact that such cold spells are becoming less frequent and that I may someday move away from where they happen is leading me to celebrate and appreciate each one a bit more.

Why do I like these cold spells so much?  It is not one thing.  It is certainly about venturing out into and braving the cold.  Being properly layered and bundled, the crunch of snow under boot or tire, the frosty breath, and the kind of solitude and introspection that can only come with the cold are what I love.  It is the short days and long nights.  It is the cloudy cold days with flurries or cold bright sunlight with an all blue cloudless sky cold.  It is the cold of still air and, even more, a howling wind kind of cold that makes you bundle up even more.

I also love being at home, sweatered or sweatshirted, having hearty meals and enjoying modern comfort and wonders gas forced air heat!  I love to curl up, I actually lounge more than curl if truth be told, with a good book, a mediocre movie, or my laptop writing a blog… just like this one.  I love the scenes of Zhivago and Lara holed up in the snow and ice encased dacha in both the novel and the film.   Those images are a mélange of eerie, beautiful, romantic, and timeless escapes. 

With tonight being Armenian Christmas Eve, the house is still decorated.  The glow of lights inside and out and all the decorations will only add to this experience.  This sense, this state of mind, would be very hard to duplicate in the places others go to escape exactly this kind of cold.

Beyond writing this post, I plan to handwrite a few letters, perhaps at one of our secretary desks.  Then I will bundle up and walk to the mailbox at the train station down the street.  I will also work on the courses I that I will be teaching in the semester that begins in two weeks.

Clearly, this is kind of weather is something that fascinates me and stirs my soul.  I am wondering how much of this is genetic.  I may be channeling the winters of my ancestors in the Armenian Highlands.  Ah… this is a poetic interpretation worthy of Yuri himself.