Surviving Winter

If it weren’t for the arctic temperatures, the driving snow, the treacherous ice, winter would be a fairly pleasant season. There was a time when I thought I actually liked winter. I lived for a year in Minnesota, owned a pair of cross-country skis, and actually used them two or three times a year. I have pictures of me bundled in a parka, ski gloves, and stocking cap, leaning on my ski poles, my exhaled breath frozen on my glasses and in icicles dangling from my beard, a smile on my face that looking back now I can only interpret as delusional. As I’ve grown older, about all I enjoy in winter is central heating, watching TV, and Johnny Walker Red, neat. In literature, winter has always symbolized death, and that seems just about right. I bring a couple of gold fish each year in from our pond to winter over in an indoor fish tank. As the two piscine lounge in their 10-gallon central-heated resort (no TV or Scotch, though), they have no awareness of their buddies who they swam with through the summer who are now entombed, frozen in a pond of ice. I watch them suspended in their tank and envy their watery ignorance of winter.