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

We wanted to get married right away.

Nearly eleven years ago, I was proposed to in a not-so-conventional way and I, of course, said yes. That was Labor Day weekend, or thereabouts, and our joy the next day was somewhat circumvented by the tragic news of Princess Diana's death.

We were young, we were hormonal, we were invincible, and we wanted to get married very soon. I knew that we couldn't afford a decent wedding, and I never thought my parents would pay for one, so we planned to elope on Sweetest Day of 1997.

Fast forward to November of 1997, and we were still not married. Our humble elopement plans had been cut short by my dad, and a 'real' wedding was being planned. My dad had astounded me by offering to pay for the event, and I actually thought that I would have some say in what went on for it. Ha.

Since the wedding was intended for family to see us off, see us married in a proper manner, we figured that it would be nice to wait until June or July, get married outside under a canopy. Rent a dance floor, have a barbeque, light some candles- oh, never mind. Dad suddenly got the idea in his head that Michael and I should get married very soon and run down to Florida for a 'working honeymoon'. There was a little startup Renaissance Faire, you see, just north of Miami, and we could operate it on the weekends and honeymoon during the week. In a tent. That was just so utterly brilliant.

I really don't know why I fell for his plans so often, but I did, once again. Michael is the most laid-back guy I've ever known, and he went along with it. My church, the one that I had served at in various capacities for several years, refused to marry us. Somehow we wound up having the nuptials and the reception in the ultra-classy Wexford County Civic Center. Some dear soul pinned a backdrop up on the bleachers so that we could have nice photos. My almost-mother-in-law cooked, sewed, decorated, and planned frantically to meet the late January deadline. Trying to make the best of the situation, as always, I asked my photographer if he would take a photo of me, in my white dress, outisde in the white snow. He said sure but never did.

So we got married in the dead of winter. On a multi-use basketball court. In the same room where I had ogled first-place ribbons on 'Agriculture Entries' for the better part of my childhood. We got married in a place that my daughter recognized as the 'Circus Place(!)' from our wedding photos. Because of my dad's business 'need'. The Ren Faire turned out to be a flop, we earned a fraction of what we were promised, and we returned to Cadillac jaded, resentful, and in debt. Somewhere along the line, I picked up pneumonia again, as well. It may have had something to do with sleeping in a tent during tornado season, I'm not sure.

We've stuck it out for over ten years. Our beginnings- if anything,- strengthened us, unified us. Every year, when our anniversary rolls around in an ugly and frigid month, and I'm too poor to holiday on a beach somewhere far away, I resent the forced winter date just a tiny bit. But then I look up at the sky and I see pure white crystals falling softly and gently to the earth- ever so quiet. They sparkle like the beads on my dress, like my eyes did when I marched so resolutely down that aisle. There is a cleanliness and purity about the snow in that dead of winter that somehow relates now to that beginning- two innocent kids so sure of themselves and so in love.

Its bridal season now, and we've been busy at work making wedding bands and sizing rings bought elsewhere. All of these fresh faces will have their summer wedding to revel in, their anniversary always in pleasant weather (unless they move to New Zealand) their fresh flowers actually in season. I no longer envy them. My wedding was as oddball and out-of-place as Michael and I are, and it really was perfect.

And they all lived happily ever after.

Labels: anniversary, love, wedding, winter

The wind came across frozen Lake Mitchell with a banshee shriek. Splinters of ice whistled through the brittle air and drove their way into every surface in view, covered the world in frigid white. Native Michiganders huddled deeper into the hearts of their homes, flickering television sets offering little in the way of warmth, but much in the way of distraction. How these people survive twenty, forty, even sixty years here I cannot fathom. I've been home for three months and can't wait to get away. There is no sunshine, no color, no reprieve from the endless cold and gray. They say the divorce rate spikes high in this time of year, and its no wonder. People stuck indoors together for weeks at a time, skin growing pale and clammy, fighting over paying the heating bill.
I grew up here, you know. As a kid I wore my (boy) cousins' hand-me-down snowpants and trekked through knee deep snow to go sledding. I got chapped cheeks, frozen digits, and pneumonia. I ate snow, melted it on top of the wood stove, and shook it out of my clothes for five months a year. Then my dad moved us to Arizona for the winters, and we were able to leave behind the gray and cold, trading it for sapphire skies and blooming deserts.
When we did move home, several years later, the winter didn't bother me for some reason. Snow driving sucked, always has, always will, but other than that I barely noticed it. Then I got married and started moving elsewhere: Ohio, southern Michigan, Traverse City. Winter is still in existence there, but nothing like it is here in Cadillac.
I have kids of my own now, who are fortunate enough to have girl snowpants. They love the ice, the cold, the frozen windswept lake. Maybe I've gotten too old, maybe too spoiled by mild winters elsewhere, I am not sure. All I know is that it's a wicked winter wonderland. And I still don't have my own snowpants.

Labels: Michigan, snow, winter