In Defense of the Cold

I challenge anyone to walk inside from the frigid outdoors today and not have something negative to say to the first person you see once you are inside. In Murfreesboro, Tennessee today, we are hovering in the teens, but I write in a warm house, relatively speaking. It is almost one hundred years old and a bit drafty, but this is to say, I realize that there are vast numbers of people in the world who do not have the convenience of walking over to a thermostat when the temperature inside strays a little too far away from that perfect sixty-eight to seventy-two range. With all respect to them, I'm not really talking to them. I'm really talking to myself.

I like extremes.  Take my coffee for instance.  I'd almost as soon drink mud than weak, cheap, Maxwell House coffee.  I realize I just lost some of you.  I am as much of a coffee snob as one can be on a mildly successful musician's income.  I even like the darkest dark roast.  I also adore garlic.  My great grandmother, whom I loved a whole lot, Lorene Kennedy, would holler to high heaven the minute we stepped close enough to an Italian restaurant to smell it... "Them I-tal-yun garlic eaters'll not catch me eatin' that mess!" she'd squeal.  Now that I think about it, she liked her coffee just dark enough to tint the water a light beige.  As for me, I'm a "more is more" kind of guy. So why can't I apply the same logic to that stinging cold air that hit my face the second I walked out the door to hit the gym this morning?  

Amanda, my wife, starts dreading winter about mid-September.  The short, dull gray days and the toes that feel like they might break off if you touched them can really get her down.  So about that time I start singing the praises of a cozy hearth, the possibility of a ski weekend, and blessed relief from the sweaty long days with slow flies and sticky nights. It usually doesn't work, but I continue to try.  It is a day like today when I find myself reaching deep within to ask "What are the redeeming qualities of winter again?"  And do I really believe all that crap I've been trying to sell Amanda?

Yes.  Winter is the season when we have more time for parties.  More long card games and laughs with friends around a cozy fire after a big bowl of homemade beef stew and corn bread. It is the time when seeds go dormant and remind us busy bee's that from time to time an entire day spent in your pajamas can be just what the doctor ordered.  Winter gives us time to go inward.  To reflect on what we've been doing and what we plan to do in the coming year.  It is the much needed calm before the storm of activity that usually accompanies the first warm days.  

Even more than that, winter helps us appreciate summer, just as without the dark, we couldn't appreciate the light, and without pain, we could not fully know joy. That's probably one of the hardest and most important lessons I ever learned. Everybody's got pain of one kind or another.  The important thing is to be reminded that you are not alone in it.  So if you haven't invited some people you can laugh with over to a home cooked meal to fill up some of these endless hours between 4:30 and time to go to bed, turn off Howie Mandel and go to the grocery store.  Get yourself a pound or two of hamburger meat, or chicken or whatever... shoot -call out for chinese if you have to, but get together and enjoy each other while the gettin's good!