Remembering Winter

A few days ago, I got dressed to go to work. I put on my long-sleeved cotton shirt, with a short-sleeved T-shirt underneath, I selected some heavier cotton slacks for warmth, I donned my ski cap and my sleeveless down vest, and stepped out the back door to go to my car. As soon as I opened the back door, I was struck with a blast of warm air that almost made me gasp. I could immediately feel sweat beginning to form above my lip. My house is nearly a hundred years old, and it is drafty and very difficult to either heat or cool, and it takes a while for the warmth or cold to settle into the house. I am always surprised when I open the door, and I am almost never appropriately dressed for the weather. When I got to the car, I flung off the hat, the vest, and rolled down all of the windows for the trip to work. I could have put on the air conditioning, but it didn't occur to me, since it was the first week in January. When I returned home from work that evening, it was dark, and in my headlights, I noticed that the daffodils that line the edges of my driveway were coming up, and had grown about three inches.

I"m not shitting you. The daffodils are coming up.

I had this weird moment, where I could not remember what month it was, and wondered if I had mistakenly taken my sleeping medication instead of my blood pressure pills for a period of 4 months.

I walked into the house where I saw in the kitchen a few shopping bags from Pottery Barn. My partner A. is a seasoned veteran of retail sales, in fact, she will eye something that she likes, and wait patiently for the season to end until that item has a tag that reads "75 percent off". She will hover for weeks, watching the price drop, and at the last moment, she'll swoop in like a capitalist bird of prey and snatch it from a fate of becoming back stock. A. and I, in the fifteen years we've been married, (oops, wait, don't get all freaked out and think that we're really married, like straight people, because everyone knows that the institution of marriage is only meant for a man and a woman, and if gay people start getting married, the next thing you know, people will try to marry their pets.... dogs, parakeets and maybe even hamsters, and how can you plan a wedding like that? What sort of rings would you suggest? One ring for the finger of the human, and maybe a matching diamond collar for the other....?) have accumulated a houseful of objects that A. has saved from the sales floor. I can honestly say that we have so much stuff, that I have had to impose some sanctions on my loving partner. She has a passionate love of artwork, but our walls are already so full, that I have put her on art restriction. Now my partner A. does not always listen to what I say, (if you have any questions about who A. listens to, I can tell you with certainty, that it's not me) but she does sometimes listen to her friends, and so I have cautioned each of the boys, (our friends Kyle and Payton, and John) to keep a vigilant watch and to steer clear of any art galleries.

There are times when my headstrong wife (oops, I meant domestic partner, I don't want to be the one who causes the downfall of the institution of marriage, causing 50 percent of all hetero marriages to end in divorce....well they already do end in divorce, but I am a recovering Catholic, and I don't really want to shoulder the blame for all of that mess) just does whatever the hell she wants to. And actually, the times that she just does what she wants far outnumber the times that she listens to me. And one such time was just a few days ago when I came home to find the shopping bags from Pottery Barn sitting on the kitchen counter. A. was ecstatic about her purchase, 75% off, and when she opened the bag and revealed the treasure inside, my heart melted and I could not bring myself to ask her to return it. Inside the bag was a Christmas tree, a tree that looked just like a real tree that had actually been snowed on. It was dusted with ice, it shimmered in the light, and it reminded me of winter.

"It reminded me of winter," A. said to me.

Today, A. came home from work with a pair of photographs that she had bought on her recent trip to Provencetown. I knew that she had violated the cease-art agreement, (I already know that A. does just what makes her happy, and I applaud her for it) and when she freed the photographs from the bubble wrap and revealed them to me, she said:

"They reminded me of winter."

In the photo's, there were two trees in a landscape of snow. In the frosted glass that framed the trees, there was a patch of clear glass that reminded me of snow days, when as a child I would wipe away the condensation from the window, and peer out over a winter landscape. I could smell the burning wood from the fireplace, and taste the hot chocolate that my mother used to make with real milk. It made me want to crawl in bed and burrow under the covers, in flannel pajamas adorned with teddy bears.

In a future without snow, our children may never know what fun it is to sled down a hill on a cheap piece of plastic, or they might see skis and snowboards only in an environmental museum. They might not ever know the pleasure of a day off of school because of too much snow, they might not even ever get to drink hot chocolate with real milk. When they go to bed at night, the heat will prevent them from knowing the comfort of flannel pajamas, and they will depend on air conditioning for their well being. Their sleep will be filled with mechanical noises, and they will never experience the silence of falling snow.

Remember Winter. It is already a thing of the past.

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