Winter, You’re Busted (ms)

I can tell how bland this winter is by the recent space filler about sleep Flannery posted. The culling of decent ideas from the nooks and crannies of his brain took far less time than one might have expected. I can only blame the predicament on the miserable winter we haven’t had.

Winter, in its usual form, gives us something to look forward to, perhaps something to dread but either way it stirs us, makes us move, breaks us from the lethargy we must endure during the bleak times of the year. That, of course, is all thrown beneath the salt spreader when winter becomes a vague show of itself as it has this year.

Temperatures in the fifties and sixties, wind out of the warm south, ground frozen only under trees and in the shadows of tall buildings; this is hardly winter. Basking in the glow of these amenities is not the way to get the blood moving. No wonder friend Flannery can only muster the strength to write about sleep. He never was what you might call a ball of fire and this winter has dashed whatever burning coals there might have been.

Of course there are good points to the situation. We needn’t fret about skidding to work in the morning, making it up the hill to home, worrying about chipped paint from chunks of salt on the road. There are no sidewalks to shovel, no driveways to clean, no mess in the front room. We are all enjoying lower heating bills and that is also a happy circumstance. Those are all positives to be put on the shelf labeled “Good Fortune” but there is also room, at the other end of that shelf, for the items one might go so far as to label, “Bad Stuff”.

Hours spent on a couch with only the barest movement of a finger changing channels on the television or, worse yet, lowering the volume so the sound doesn’t interfere with an afternoon snooze. The consumption of feel good foods in far greater amounts than at any other time of the year, that’s pretty bad too. The general blah feeling that allows us only the energy to go to work each day and barely make it home at days end, another sign of such a season as this. In moderation, of course, these are all just fine and I might even add a decent book on an evening as another but in huge amounts, those many of us are experiencing in this less than spectacular winter, it’s not so good.

We need to get up and get out, to enjoy the slap of cold air against our faces, the rush of it into our bodies while we breath deeply. The scraping of skates along the ice, the sound of skis on a steep trail, the joyous yells of children glad for the first downhill run aboard a trusty sled. This, folks, is what a decent winter ought to be and not the poor misnamed time of darkness and dampness we’re living through this year. Now, if you’ll pardon me, I am heading for a nap.

–Mike Stevens

~ by admin on February 13, 2012.