Bring On The Cold

I see I have some explaining to do. I’m out of sync with virtually everyone else I know in enjoying cold weather. Not for me the baking hot days of summer, tans, and flip flops; I love the hint of fall in the air and the season’s first snow.

Maybe it’s my heritage. I’m a typical American mutt, a mix of Irish, Dutch, and German ancestry, but it’s the Irish part people notice, or did until my red hair turned gray. I was the kid in grade school who wore long pants on sweltering midwestern summer days because even brief exposure to the sun gave me a fierce sunburn. I was the pasty-faced kid covered with freckles from head to foot. Yup, that kid. 

But when October arrived, I was given a new lease on life. In the cool air, I could finally breathe, and my coarse, heavy jeans weren’t quite so out of place. I could disappear into the woods for hours at a time, lying in the grass and feeling the cool earth press against my back, sensing more than hearing its insistent reminder: cool weather ahead; winter is coming. 

That’s the same message, incidentally, that my vastly more sane friends hear when they start getting antsy for a vacation to the coast of Florida. But for me, I enjoy nothing more than being out in the thick of it, and at least for an hour or two, feeling the cold against my cheeks, the bite in the air, the knowing of what will come.

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