The Wisconsin Winter will always be an arch-nemesis in my eyes.
Oh, I know it's an overstatement to most. Winter is thought of as a season-- difficult and cold at times, but wonderful all the same. The thing is, people usually say that from an insulated house with forced-air heating. They probably get all their groceries from a store. Which is perfectly fine and great. But if they'd ever stared it full in the face and wrangled with it for their very survival, they'd come away with a different perspective.
Winter can never be just a season, a temperature or a period of time, for me. It is a villainous character. I will never be able to see it as anything but a foe to be fought every, single, year... Fought with the knowledge that, time after time, we will stoically suffer defeat.
A big defeat, by our miserable enemy that is foul and intimidating and especially crushing, mostly because it always wins. You can survive Winter. You can't beat it.
Scenes from my farm-life childhood still affect how I view the seasons now. Autumn would come-- yes, that season all the hipster girls, and actually probably just the majority of females, fawn over and celebrate with burnt-orange outfits, pumpkin spice lattes and cozy scarf hashtags-- and a sickening feeling would hit my stomach.
It was this prickly, panicky sensation of the urgent. Adrenaline and a little fearful motivation, mixed with the feeling you get when you begin to lag behind in a race. Because Fall was a nasty little messenger that liked to announce and then rub in our faces the impending coming of Winter.
In the face of its trash-talking, I missed the beauty of falling leaves. The crisp, chilly air everyone else seems to enjoy was like a knife in the back of everyone living off the land, twisting its way more uncomfortably into our brains, reminding us of all we did not have ready before The Great Oppression would hit. The gales that sung melodies to others were haunting and terrifying to us. "Before the snow flies" may have been my dad's most commonly-used phrase around those times.
"Gotta get a lot more firewood before the snow flies."
"Gotta train that horse before before the snow flies."
"Gotta get the siding on the barn before the snow flies."
And then, it flew. Beautiful and new and refreshing, at the very first... only to quickly over-stay its welcome. Over the numbingly dreadful course of monotonous months, it became an unwanted tyrant with an agenda to kill life, destroy dreams and mutilate every last little shred of hope or happiness we might cling to. The initially-pretty white became a blinding, hypnotizing, overbearing, depressing white.
We shoveled its endless snow.
We were up in the middle of the night, trying to build a windbreak, to keep it from killing our cattle.
We trekked through its depths, day in and day out, and somehow it always crept into our boots and wet our socks.
We suffered near-frostbite at its unmerciful hands.
We crossed our fingers that there was enough food in the cellar to get us through its pervasive, unrelenting lifelessness.
There's a deficit of LIFE in Winter. We all know the kinds of things that tend to typify something that's alive; something that has lifeblood of some sort coursing through its veins: Color. Growth. Vibrancy. Some degree of warmth.
None of that in Winter. In Winter, you feel like the only cell of life on a frozen, dead planet. In fact, you feel like the entire frozen planet wants to make you frozen and dead, too. Like everything is working against you. And you start to resent this entity that you can't grab, can't strangle, can't sock in the face-- but it can sure do a number on every tangible and intangible part of you.
You step onto the mat with the opponent you can't see. He clocks you upside the chin, bashes your face in, picks you up, bodyslams you, and proceeds to beat you to a bloody pulp on the floor. Every little defeat for you is not enough for him. There must be more...
You're not supposed to "kick a man when he's down," right? But Winter doesn't play by the rules. He's never satisfied with momentary torture. He taunts, "Yeah, you survived that round. Guess what!? It's not a matter of 'rounds.' We're gonna be in here for MONTHS."
Death, death, death. There's a lot of deadness about Winter. And it always feels like it won't be happy til you're dead, too. Maybe a little part of you starts to succumb when it injects this creepy, insane feeling into you: "What's the point?" ...Of anything. It doesn't have to make sense.
What's the point of making dinner? It's Winter.
What's the point of doing laundry? It's Winter.
What's the point of trying to go anywhere? It's Winter.
What's the point of getting up this morning? For what? IT'S WINTER.
And everybody thinks "cabin fever" is kind of a joke...
But something happens between you and Winter.
While you will forever hate it, there is a sick part of you that starts to love it. You've been in and out of the ring with it so many times that it has seen every one of your small victories and big losses. And that makes it a part of your life and experiences. It kind of shares in something a lot of other people and things don't share in.
You love it for who it makes you. You love it for how it sharpens you and makes you iron-will-strong; knocks the feebleness out of you and replaces it with backbone... genuine, bona fide muster, solid with experience... chutzpah. You embrace how it has made you less dependent on anything and anyone but God. You really develop this addictive, masochistic need to emerge every Spring with that triumphant attitude, a huge grin smattered across your pasty-white, illness-ridden face with hollow eyes, that says:
"You never stopped howling, but you never made me go away. So really, I have won. Take. THAT."
Then the sun comes out. And the snow-- the visible manifestation of that invisible, hateful foe-- begins to melt into water. It trickles into the ground and the brown, matted grass gasps breath into its suffocated lungs and drinks it in. It turns a rich, bright shade of green you seriously can't find anywhere else in the entire earth. Tiny, pale green buds form on the trees that once looked like eternally dead carcasses. The crocus flowers peek out bravely and your soul exults at the color and the LIFE. The horses that did no more than hobble for the last seven months get spunky and silly and frolic with energy in the pasture.
You know there is a Summer of backbreaking work ahead of you, but it will be laced with beauty and adorned by breathtaking sunsets, swims in the creek, watermelon in the backyard, and the satisfaction of a hard day's accomplishments.
To breathe in the Spring air is to breathe in the most healing fragrance; it is balm for your body and soul; it is life-water... such that you cannot remember if Winter was ever real or just a long-forgotten nightmare.
You would do anything to see this again.
And so you stay. Winter will be waiting. And you will take him on.
