I've Felt The Coldness Of My Winter. I Never Thought It Would Ever Go.*

It’s a beautiful Spring day here in south-central Wisconsin. The trees are budding, the grass is greening, and the snow is falling.

The snow is falling.

It is falling all over the four square feet of land in front of the condo we rent.

I finally have a bit of space where I can have a garden, and damned if I’m not going to plant the crap out of that thing. Errrr...I’m not going to plant crap, but flowers. Maybe I’ll use crap as a fertilizer. That’s the green thing to do, right?

“Mom?” I asked the other day. “When can I start planting flowers?” Hey, I spent the last three years. What do I know?

“Oh, not until the end of May. You just can’t be sure there won’t be a freeze before then.”

The thing is, I’m ok with this. Because it’s not as though Winter will give Spring and Summer a miss and go straight on into Autumn. The signs of Spring are all around me.

Disclaimer: This is not representative of 

scientifically cromulent weather systems.

Grass and daffodils burst through the ground.

Granted, only to be bitch-slapped by Old Man Winter

The animals are mating.  In my front yard.

Hey kids!  Come look!  Biology!

And Mother Nature has given us a couple teasers of warm sunny days.

NOT YOURS! Yet. 

*Name this song for a free unicorn**.

**Unicorns are on back order. You will be notified as to their availability.

I Can't Talk Now, I'm Awaiting The Four Horsemen And Their Eight Tiny Reindeer. Or Something Like That.

Thus accounts my survival of Snowpocolypse 2011...

Sunday:  What? There’s a major weather system passing through southern Wisconsin this week?  They didn’t say ANYTHING about this on Nick Jr.

More Sunday:  We go grocery shopping after supper.  We usually grocery shop Sunday evenings anyhow, because the store is slow, and there’s less of a chance my children will attach themselves to some one else’s cart and go home to a household where they’re allowed to eat white bread.

I'm dismayed to see 500 people roaming the aisles in search of sustenance.  There is plenty of milk and bread to go around, but the store is strangely devoid of whole chickens.

Monday: A small weather system rolls through.  There’s several inches of snow on the ground. Life goes on as usual, because it's Wisconsin.

Tuesday evening:  I'm shredding cheese for supper.  Preschooler asks for some, so I break a piece off the block of cheese for her.  She exclaims the cheese is big, just like my butt.  You can’t make this shit up.

Later Tuesday evening: The larger weather system rolls through. We now have a foot or two of snow on the ground, with 3-4 foot high drifts.  It is pretty, but not life-threatening.  Biggest casualty: Our outdoor thermometer got knocked down and buried in snow. NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!

Wednesday: The bus system is down, so Husband is home from work.  I'm secretly glad, since now I’ll be able to clean the bathrooms.  Hooray?

Even More Wednesday: We're still awaiting the Four Horsemen the media predicted will follow this storm, heralding the end of the world. Unless Death replaced his pale horse with a snow plow, I don’t think they’re coming. I'm strangely disappointed.

In conclusion: I'm always let down by every little snow the media hypes up.  Apparently, I subconsciously believe that the world will end due to a blizzard, sometime during my lifetime.

I'm not sure what this says about my dreams in life.  Probably that they're very cold, and feed to my inner desire to remain a hermit forever.

Don't Over-Think Things. And Don't Stick Your Hand In The Snow.

For the first time since I started this blog, I am at a loss of what to write. I have a lot of starts to posts, but they don’t go anywhere.

Take, for example:

Best Friend and lived kitty-corner to each other. That is, if the homes in our neighborhood were the 4 corner states of the United State, she’d be Colorado and I’d be Arizona, at least from my perspective.

We did this all the time.

The first winter we spent together she took off her mitten and stuck her hand in the snow. Then she cried, and we had to go inside. At the time I thought, “WTF are you doing?!”

Now, as a parent, I understand her thought process. The snow looked soft and pretty. If she touched it would it feel like a sparkly marshmallow? NO. It felt cold and wet. DAMMIT.

And then, how do I end it? Something about the innocence of youth? Something about how dorky Best Friend and I were?

Maybe, sometimes, a story doesn’t have a deeper meaning. It just ends. Sometimes things just happen, they are what they are, they don’t need complex analysis.

Sometimes, I need to stop over-thinking everything, and just go on with it. Or let it go. Whatever is more appropriate.

Also, I didn’t want to end the week with a post about a detachable penis.

There Is No Wonderland. Just Winter. Also, Bah Humbug.

I tend to be a real hermit come winter.

Alas, it is snowing.

I avoid going outside. And, I avoid going outside. And then, I avoid going outside.

I don’t like snow. I don’t care that I grew up in Wisconsin. I don’t care that I spent 2 1/2 years living in colder Minnesota. I don’t care that I spent 3 1/2 years in milder (albeit still cold. Sort of. Sometimes.) Ohio.

I don’t like snow. I don’t like being cold.

But I do like an excuse to add hot cocoa and mochas to my hot beverage repertoire.

I like duping myself into making heart-attack inducing casseroles (hotdish to my friends in Minnesota) reasoning they'll stick to my bones.

You mean corn-dog casserole ISN’T good fore me? But it has corn in it!

I like being able to stay in my sweatpants all day, since I’m not going anywhere. Actually, I already do that, even when I have places to go. But now it’s LEGIT.

However, my hermit ways also manifest themselves when I’m depressed. I pine, not for the fjords, but for a deep, dark cave where I can go unnoticed and silent until the end of days. Like the prisoners of Plato’s cave, I see only the false shadows of my mind’s making.

Hermiting in the winter is ok, so long as it limits itself to things like sweaters and hot chocolate. It is not ok when it harbors solitude and sadness.

For me, at least, it’s a fine line.