Inches of snow and ice compel me to justify my choice of home states with vast generalizations. Here goes: Consistent sunshine and warm temperatures makes one stupid, apathetic, insensitive and prone to emphasize the wrong details.
Born and currently residing in the Midwest I have many friends of Middle West roots. These are solid, good people with solid, good values (not those venomous "family values" of Bill Bennett literary lore). These friends may not currently reside in the Midwest but wherever they may be they take that impenetrable common sense, humble dignity, gleaming goodness and admirable groundedness with them (until they ultimately return to the Midwest... which they do, Sponge/Lex).
What instills these assets? Suffering. Not the Bodhisattva sand-in-mouth variety, but the day-to-day merciless grind of penetrating, bone-cracking cold, life-threatening travel and very limited access to fresh air and blue skies that only a Great Plain Winter provides. These simple though powerful things and their multi-month presence craft a compassionate, intuitive, loving and well-adjusted individual. Growth by deprivation. These make good peoples.
Staying indoors for months. Eating things out of cans. Watching your skin color move from a pomegranate ruddiness to a Jimmy Stewart gray. Much reality TV, alcohol, pithy and intense talk with family and friends, increased familiarity with 10-hour naps, half-hour showers, sheer impatience, calendar stalking, enlightened irritability, wet feet, mechanical malfunctions, magazine memorizations, a truce with dust, chappedchappedchapped, making many plans for changing your life when the sun arrive... these are a few of Winter things. These are the things which test one's capacity for hope, but these are also the things that once retired to memory leave in their wake, like a slug's trail, a grateful, sympathetic and fulfilled person (if you have not succumbed to chronic alcoholism). These make good people.
Those who have sun and nice weather, or were bred in that environment, cannot resist softness, superficiality, the visceral. I cannot be convinced they know what they have. I cannot be convinced that they will ever be able to convincingly confront a challenge and overcome it. Soft and brown and baked with an innate sense of entitlement.
The truth is I'm enormously jealous and bitter and a little bit drunk and I hate Winter. I hate falling on ice all the time, running my car into things, defrosting my hair, eating soup, in a functional cryo-sleep. Hate. It.
4 comments:
It's gray and cold here again in Kentucky.
Jan/Feb are a drag here, but things are supposed to ease up a bit in March, unlike Chicago, where winter lasts until May.
Winter lasts until Winter, forever in my cold, black heart
If I could only BBQ more in the winter, I would personally have absolutely no need for summer. Summer exhausts me.
But for the sake of my marriage, summer can't come soon enough. The wife's SAD, it is mighty.
Not me, now way, not coming back. Did my time.
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