Should we talk about the weather?
Let's talk about the weather, I've been dying to talk about the weather.
Morning to noon to night, there was a sun I'm sure. I must have missed it skipping to the bus, then the basement office, then the bus, then back to my home. I've heard that, like, 75% of folks who live above a certain latitude are deficient in vitamin D and happiness. It's true! That's me and 7.5 of my 10 friends.
Shall I sing a litany of winter horrors? Days crawl past without a glimpse of the sun. Sleep is an impossibility. One feels like a wrung out dish towel. I have entered the stage of winter where I am more like a chalk police outline than a human. And for what?
For what do I bear this suffering? To reside in the state that bore me? Every year I tell myself: this is the year I move to Miami. I will become one with the beach. I will drink fruity cocktails at stupid parties and dance to music spun by 40-year-old DJs in Hawaiian shirts.
But for what do I stay? I've read a little of Wendell Berry. I like him. He talks about roots. What it means to have a home that is somewhere, not just anywhere. I was born in Minnesota, and hope against hope that I die here too. I have visions of a rooted life. Of having kids and grandkids that grow up within 12 miles of where I was born. BUT! An important detail that is often overlooked in such pastoral/homesteader/organic farm/radically rooted-type fantasies is that one might grow up in Minnesota, where Minnesota Winter qua Minnesota Winter is deeply contradictory to human flourishing.
This is a serious question: am I just going to cede half of my years on God's green earth to despair and misery?
Every Minnesotan says it a hundred times every winter. It's not the cold, it's the dark that get you. And it is fully true. The cold really isn't that bad. The snow is even a little beautiful. But the sun goes down at 4:00 p.m. and it doesn't rise again until 8:00 a.m. the next day. That's sixteen hours of darkness. Two thirds of one's day are dim as Hades. It's all we really talk about in winter. It's not the cold, it's the darkness. Yes, yes, we all already know it and we can't wait to say it to every new transplant who finds themselves deadened by that truth.
The doldrums of winter have arrived and there is no comfort in cross-country skiing or ice skating or tubing. There are only mild days that blur with the sharp edges of black midnight. I feel like a dish towel wrung out and hung on a frozen clothesline. The nights where one stays in begin to pile up like dirty heaps of snow on a parking lot curb. One obnoxiously clings to a drying Christmas tree, the last night the cold and snow and darkness felt reasonable.
I wrote the above sentences a few weeks ago now and didn't know how to finish it. I think I have an idea now. The sun has come out. It always does. I was sipping on some coffee a couple days ago now, and it was 7:00 a.m., and the sun was shining in my eyes so I had to squint a little bit as the light filtered through the pine tree outside my window. There were some shadows waving back at me on the table; discrete and external to me. From my high-top stool they seemed a little silly in their fluttering motion.