A Difference of Opinion

Snow!

It came to us last night, stealing over the wet ground quietly. My oldest child, who listens to radio weather obsessively, awoke with a happy cry and bright eyes. All three ran to the windows- bedroom, living room, then the kitchen, making sure the glorious sight did not disappear in the moment it took to cross our house.

Brand new snow boots were strapped on with last year's coats and mittens. Up here, few people can afford a whole new outfit every year, and many of us try to keep two sets of it all in constant soggy rotation. Winter is a five to six-month affair, and it is fairly brutal. We don't suffer as much as Canada or some of the northern states without water, the lake effect insulates Michigan just enough to stave off the bitterest cold most years.

My kids all love the snow- cold and wet, crisp and squeaky, icy pellets- all of the different kinds of frozen precipitation delight them. My husband loves the snow, he loves to bundle up in multiple scarves and drink hot liquids with honey. His brother, a professional snowboarder, has to love the snow, he's under contract. I am the odd man out in my family, the only grumpy grinch who growls at the leaden clouds and curses the icy downpour endangering my car and family.

Sure, there are those magical nights when the snow is perfectly formed into sparkling snowflakes. Our headlights catch the crystalline surfaces, turning them into diamonds- the only kind of gems that I cannot capture in a ring. That is magical snow, it only comes when the environment is the exact combination of dry and frigid, and it is not enough to make up for the endless months of gray sludge by the side of the road. Then there are the mornings when one awakens to heavy frosting on every single tree limb and branch- lovely sugar coated fantasyland. Those days are also magical, also lovely, but still no match for warm sun on my shoulders, green grass, and sun glinting off the unfrozen lakes.

What we have here is simply a difference of opinion, right? Surely there is nothing actually evil about winter! But here is where the difference stems from: I had the distinct privilege of spending ten of my winters soaking in the sun in Arizona. Snow was a seldom-seen anomaly, it kept to the mountains, where it belonged. While my relatives shivered in January, we enjoyed crisp evenings. The desert bloomed in March, I sunbathed in my backyard, and we didn't go back to Michigan until the ground was covered in green. So I'm a little spoiled. It's been thirteen years since I've been that lucky, but I still despise the cold every year.

If my husband and kids would experience the warm winters, the desert awash in bloom every spring, the sapphire skies... they might think a bit more like me. Or maybe, like the bloody optimists that they are, they'd still enjoy every season as it comes, every drop of rain and fleck of white snow and flower and blade of grass.

That's the real difference of opinion: all opinions, all emotions, all thoughts. I'd like to learn to make my opinions different- to appreciate the winter along with the fall and the spring and the wet and the cold and the spiders and the rising costs of everything and my customers and neighbors and kids and all of it.

I want the difference of opinion.

Labels: opinions, pessimism, winter