Winter Wishes, Winter Woes

By Rick Horowitz

Happy now? Got what you wanted? Great. Now, would somebody pass me the earmuffs?

Gray after gray it was, day after day. January was cloudy. February was worse. Something about a stalled low-pressure system. Something about El Nino. I never did catch all the details, but it didn't matter; I was ecstatic.

What came with the gray -- for a month, almost two months -- was "unseasonably mild." Every day for nearly 50 days, right here in the heart of the Midwest, the temperature on the ground was higher than the temperature in the rule books. In February, in Wisconsin, the grass was turning green.

In February, in Wisconsin, you could see the grass. Grass, and miles and miles of bare pavement. A miracle.

Not good enough.

For certain friends and neighbors, that is -- the balmy temps and gentle breezes weren't good enough. Go to the store and they were complaining about the weather. Turn on the local news and they were complaining some more.

It's boring, they said. It never changes, they said. And that gray is soooo depressing.

"We'd gladly trade some of these warm gray days" -- they said this, I heard them say this -- "for some cold and sunny days, the kind we used to have."

And they even said this: "We miss winter."

They're not missing it anymore. Not after the front moved through. Not after the Night of Flying Garbage Cans. By the skin of our chattering teeth, we managed to avoid the major snow dump that shut down everything around us. So we're not sitting there stranded on some interstate, running our motors just to keep warm, praying we've got enough gas in the tank to make it until the tow trucks show up. Our power lines haven't gone snap, crackle and pop on us.

Not yet, anyway. But hey, it's winter again -- you never know. Meanwhile, we're fighting off the mini-mercury and the sub-zero wind chills. Just like old times.

What were they thinking?!

Complaining that the weather wasn't interesting enough? Complaining that it was too depressing? It's not like these folks were serious skiers, desperate to waggle over a mogul somewhere. It's not like they had teams of huskies going to seed in the tool shed. They were just normal (I thought), reasonable people. Wrong. They're balmier than the weather was.

You figure they'd have left well enough alone, wouldn't you? Particularly considering the alternatives. I mean, California is having all sorts of "interesting" weather this winter -- or don't you consider floods and mud slides "interesting"? Florida, too. Very "interesting" -- if you're into tornadoes.

Gray skies are depressing? Sure they are. But they're not half as depressing as having to slog through knee-high drifts for months on end, or having to check for ice every time you put your foot down. Not half as depressing as wrapping yourself in so many layers each time you leave the house that you look like the Michelin man. On steroids.

Not half as depressing as turning every five-minute errand into a random ramble through the neighborhood, because it's so cold out there your car battery may not start again to get you home from wherever you're going unless you drive around for half an hour first just to recharge the thing. Not half as depressing as hooking up the jumper cables.

People actually missed all that?

I'll take boring.

3/13/98