Ann’s Memoir Part blahblah: Ode on My Most Hated Season

Lawton, MI vineyard, Thanksgiving

 It’s March 22, technically spring, which to us in Wisconsin is really winter-lite-plus-muddy. It’s 28 degrees, and the air is wet and smells like newly uncovered dog poo. That’s the smell of relief. For this part of my memoir (maybe?), I recall the winters of the northern Midwest.

I’ve never lived anywhere but the Midwest, possibly the most unforgiving climate for a person with RA. I’ve tried to get away, and still hold out hope that I may get a job in the southern US, but not because I hate the Midwest. I just hate the Midwest winter. When I talk about moving to Texas, or New Mexico, or Louisiana, I find it remarkable how many of my comrades say they would “miss the seasons.” I tell them I too miss the seasons. I miss spring, fall and summer. I miss them for five months every year – sometimes more. But you’ll miss the snow, they say. Eventually, you’ll come to miss the snow. No I really won’t. Not eventually, not ever. I’m envious at people’s selective memory for these winters, and a little resentful. I’d like to fill in those gaps for them now.

The snow comes before the real cold. When you see that first flake drift down, it dawns on you. The sentence is long. It’s November now or even October. It will be April, or even May, before your feet feel warm again. When you no longer smell the sweet scent of dying leaves, because the cold has turn everything to soil, that’s when you realize. It begins.

No sense in cleaning that floor until April.

Perhaps I’m being a little dramatic, but put yourself in the shoes of someone with terrible joints and limited hand mobility. Here’s a day in the life of winter. You pry yourself from a warm bed while it’s still dark out, and the cold hits right away. It will hit harder when you get naked, and even harder when you emerge wet from the shower. Your coffee doesn’t get cold, because you swill it so hard out of desperation for warmth that it’s soon gone. This is a through-the-body cold. A cold in your guts cold.

 By the time you get warm, you have to leave for work. But you can’t just go. You must put on a scarf, hat, mittens and coat. The hat is not negotiable, so doing your hair doesn’t have much point. You grow comfortable with flat, bedhead hair. You and all your Midwest brethren are “schlubs”. Pasty, ragged and splotchy. There’s no pretty in this weather. You also have to put on boots at the door. My personal favorite is when the laces are so caked with road salt, you can’t tie them. You can’t do anything with gloved hands, so you have to take them off and rest them on the floor while you tie your boots. Then put them on again.

For me, a fall is dangerous. Because of my size and my RA, my bones are deteriorating fast. I’m basically gristle and bone powder. But each day in the Midwest, you must walk on ice. Often, property owners do not shovel the snow on their sidewalks until a thick layer is plastered onto them by foot traffic. This layer melts and freezes, melts and freezes, until it is a solid ice rink. This gives birth to the precarious “corn cob walk” that Midwesterners adopt, in which each step is taken with slow and sweaty deliberation to avoid a broken hip or concussion. There’s nothing quite like the sound of the back of your own head hitting ice-coated pavement. I know.

My windshield. February.

Should you make it to your car intact, you must often break a layer of ice to open the door. Assuming it starts, and you’d better hope your battery is up to snuff, you must scrape, scratch, and sometimes chip a layer of frost and/or ice to be able to see. This after brushing off a layer of snow up to five inches from the entire body of the car, much of which ends up on your body. Now you’re wet. The snow removal instrument of your choice has made its home in the back seat now. The hope is that you won’t often need to use the teeth feature on the back on the scraper, because the ice on your windows has to be broken up before being scraped off. You’re still wet when you get into your car, and if you’re lucky, the heat has kicked in. With my car, this doesn’t happen so fast.

If you’ve ever had your fingers and toes stepped on, you might be able to approximate the feeling of below-freezing temperatures, even on covered extremities. There’s not much point in makeup this time of year. The cold turns skin into a red, dry carpet of nerves. It makes your eyes water. Much like being spanked. That’s what winter is here. A long, long spanking.

I-94

Driving on snow-covered roads – now that’s a real peach. Most Midwesterners can say they’ve risked their lives up to ten times every year just trying to get to work. Accidents abound, often due to the very same selective memory I mention above. If you don’t slow down your driving significantly, you risk “spinning out” or just ramming into the car in front of you despite your best braking. Did you know you’re supposed to turn into a skid? We in Wisconsin do. Even the most careful driver isn’t safe when it’s early and the plows haven’t yet made the rounds.

Of course you might not make it out of your driveway at all some mornings. Not without the help of a great big shovel. Depending on the depth of snow, it may take an hour to free yourself. You can hope the snow is airy and light, but it’s just as likely to be as wet and heavy as clay. But your wheels won’t go on it, so you get to work. The front steps and the driveway have to be cleared as well as the sidewalk. When I first moved to Milwaukee I lived in a flat in a corner house, so we had double the sidewalks. One year, the snow fell ten inches a weekend when my roommate Kerry was gone to New York. It took six hours, broken up by a couple of hot chocolate/Irish Breakfast breaks, and one 20-minute nap. The next week my arm muscles exploded. Anyway that’s what it felt like.

 

You arrive at work sweaty and yet cold, red blotches on your face, snot oozing out of your nose uncontrollably, hair pressed down against your skull in strings, flecks of mud and salt and wet all over your pants. Sun rises when you sit at your desk, goes down before you leave.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

The winter here isn’t just hard. It’s a metaphor for failure and disenfranchisement. The lack of mobility. The constant fear of injury and illness. The absence of light. It’s a reminder to me every year that I am mediocre. That is why I am still here, in the Midwest, after years of study and the hopes of leaving. In summer, the Midwest is okay. Good beer, bratwurst and kielbasa on the grill. Lakes wherever you are. Fishing and golfing galore. Bonfires. In the fall it’s downright awesome. The brilliant leaves in ochre and crimson and fiery orange. Cider. Good beer. Even I can forget then that I didn’t succeed and maybe never will. That I’m stuck here in the land of the underachievers because I’m a mediocre teacher and a mediocre writer. Winter provides that reminder, and it doesn’t just whisper in my ear gently, boy did you ever mess up your life. It burns the message into my cheek with a fire brand.

I remember liking winter when I was a child, and I’m glad to see my nephew getting a chance to enjoy the snow that way too. When the snow is just heavy and packed enough, you can build a decent igloo fort. Many an afternoon was spent in snow pants pretending I was on the Planet Hoth. Snow is the Midwestern pre-adolescent’s Play-Doh. Living in the country, we had many choices for our very own sledding hill as well. You aren’t from the Midwest if you haven’t knocked the wind out of yourself flying off a homemade snow ramp in the middle of a sled path onto a layer of hard pack.

Sometimes, it’s pretty. When the temperatures are especially cold, it falls like a light powder and sparkles in the sunlight or moonlight. The snow recently here has been in a kind of crème brulee stage: powder that has a crusty layer on top because of a light mist that has frozen and turned glossy like burned sugar. Most of the time, though, it looks like shit. Literally, God’s shit. And sometimes I feel like we are God’s shit and the Midwest is a celestial sewer. Not the blouse but the tag. Not the toaster but the box it came from. Everything you can’t use and don’t need. Everything you’ve seen before.

As pure as the driven what now?

On a brighter note, the sun is out and the snow is gone. Gone – my favorite snow stage. It will snow again, undoubtedly. But the end is near. The lilacs are coming. I’m not waiting up, but I’m waiting patiently.