year after year

Ah, here we are again. I speak mostly to Northerner’s when I say: how does it feel to be half-thawed?

Year after year, around this time, I’m always so surprised to meet myself again - yet she does not come willingly. The more I talk of these things the more I hear, “me too,” or “I’m thankful I’m not alone.” The sirens of winter creep up and grab hold our roots.

Much like the trees who are only just beginning to bud, we spend early spring lifeless and bare like late November… well, they must grow and heal what can’t be seen before considering blooming. Us too.

Years ago, sometime around my junior year of college, I read an article that you likely recognize - one concluding that cold weather countries have the happiest people in the world.

Having first read this in February of my third winter, well, I was flabbergasted. Never mind the signs of my sun-starved bleakness, a deep depressive condition that we all sort of wear come February in the North.

I remember thinking “It must be Italy, Greece, or Morocco with the happiest people in the world,” Do you see the bias in my words? Sun. A different kind of north-country-dreaming.

And yet, here I am at the end of my ninth winter, and I have come to see the irony.

Anyone who lives in long, harsh winters, knows just how beautiful the world is when it melts. We relish in each and every warm spring day, to the point of feeling day drunk and hopelessly in love with spring. It’s like heartbreak and falling in love, year after year.

Winter, no matter how beautiful, freezes us alongside the rest of the world. Many things become a bother, especially winter’s chores, and each day outside feels like a grand feat. A foreign concept to our summer selves, who hardly blink after 16 hour days outside.

The closer we get to the poles, the more extreme our sense of solstices becomes. There’s something simultaneously balanced and chaotic about a pendulum with a heavy swing.