An Icy Calm Before an Arctic Storm

I love winter. I really do. I mean, I love all the seasons, and winter has exceptional beauties. See how the bare trees stand out against gray skies, how the sun makes a faint appearance through the clouds and branches, casting a pallid light that seems to emanate from everywhere at once. See how the snowy mist among the dark tree trunks makes the world feel...alluring, mysterious, full of possibility. You could almost picture a moose emerging from the mists...or a band of Vikings.

What I don't like about winter is the fact that this ridiculous animal that I've been left to care for--this dog--refuses to go out in the cold, and when I pick it up and put it outside, it makes a great show of limping, but it won't wear the dog shoes I made for it or the dog coat I fashioned out of a Dollar General hoody. (I was not meant to be an animal keeper.) Also, I don't like the fact that, as a people, we've forgotten how to drive in the winter. Sensationalistic weather reporting scares people and makes them drive even worse. I don't recall many subzero days when I was a kid--in the 1970s and 80s. Those are a result of climate change--polar icecaps melting and releasing arctic air, as I understand it. But winters in those days were consistently cold, in the 20s from mid-December to mid-March. All in all, I like winter. If you go outdoors, you have the whole world to yourself. The wintry woods was so beautiful yesterday that I bundled up, took a bag-chair, and went outside to sit in -4 degrees...just looking at the skies, and the trees, and the snow.

Temps the next few days will be well below zero, and we might get a foot or two of snow. Everyone seems to think it's going to be catastrophic, and it would be if you were unhoused. I worry about the electrical grid; what happens if we lose electricity? I have no other means to heat the house. We tried to reopen one of the 8 fireplaces in our Pittsburgh house, but it was going to cost too much. The winter storm is supposed to hit tonight around 7pm, so alas, I need to hurry back to the city...back to a house where Jack Frost never paints ever-changing, monochromatic tableaux on the windows. As a kid, I truly never believed in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. All it took was a December visit to a Five & Dime Santa Claus to convince me that the whole thing was a hoax. I must have been 5, and I remember it right well. (C'mon, a cotton ball beard?) But I also remember marveling and believing that Jack Frost had come in the night to make icy art on the windows. He captured my imagination in a way that the other mythical beings did not.