Ugh. Winter. The reality of the whole thing has just hit me. And frankly, I’d like to send it back.
I love winter. Or rather, used to love winter. I have romantic, nostalgic notions of the season from my childhood. Blanketed in snow from October to April, Toledo was seemingly made for winter. Major events in my life, from learning to drive to soccer games, in some way or another involve the season of winter. Dark, wet, comfortable winter.
But now that I’m an adult, snow days no longer exist. Responsibilities now pile up, and there is no Universal Excuse to cache in a day and sit around watching TV, sipping cocoa and planning for hours of endless sledding (that’s “sled-riding” for my weirdo Cincinnati friends). Instead, winter becomes the time where “house projects involving outside work” take a back seat. Unshovled driveways are no longer playgrounds. Heat bills are, most certainly, no joking matter.
But even more so, the stretch of time between Jan. 1 and sometime in spring is the most painful, dreary and exhausting stretch. No definite breaks in work and no sunshine to make a working day slightly more tolerable…these few months are like a dark night of the soul, and emerging from it in the spring truly is like escaping the shadow of Hell. Perhaps it all feels much more dramatic when you’re seasonally affected, fighting depressive emotions due to lack of sunshine?
Nonetheless, I feel myself sliding straight into this period. And though I’ve gotten better over the past few years by learning to supplement and pack activities to keep myself going (excercising, freelance, etc), there is no escaping the inevitable.
Therefore, I declare that henceforth the months of January, February and the first two weeks in March to be eliminated completely. Post Christmas, we shall all jump straight into sunny weather, with summer vacations right around the corner. Eh?
