#11: This One's for Toni.

(Blogger's Note: I recognize just how pathetic and whiny this all sounds, considering the tragedy that is unfolding in Japan, following the earthquake and tsunami, that my unhappiness with the weather does not even register on the same scale with ten thousand or more dead and billions in damages. But a writer can only write what he knows, and I cannot begin to fathom what it must be like to go through a disaster like that. So I offer a brief interlude in the real suffering of the world: here's a chance to distract yourself with my petty problems, shake your head, and go back to the real world after. Enjoy.)

You know that feeling you get: when you wake up after a week, a solid seven days, of suffering through a head cold, and as soon as you shake off some of the muzziness of sleep, you try to inhale and realize that your nose is still stuffed; you cough and once again, again, for the eighth day in a row, your throat is dry and cracked and painful -- you're still sick. That anger and frustration and disappointment -- you were so sure that this morning you'd feel better! What is this, the World's Strongest Cold? Some cyborg, solid-titanium-pneumatic-gleaming-robot-side, steroid-inflated-flesh-on-the-living-side Terminator germ or something? -- that sheer disgust with your own body for not being strong enough to rescue you from this (I love conversations in my head that refer to "me" as different from my body. I imagine that little guy in "Men In Black," only he looks like me. Though obviously not my body, since that's not me, right?), that hatred of the coming day that had been so promising because you were going to feel better, but instead you're looking at another day, yet another day, of slimy gray misery.

That's how I feel about winter in March.

Pardon me: let me focus that lens a little tighter. That's how I feel about winter in March in Oregon. Where I grew up, winter in March was not so bad; as a kid I was sorry to see the snow go, and I'd always hope for one last good storm, one last snow day, one last trip down the sledding hill at the golf course up by Benjy Grossman's house. Even without snow, March was a month of clearly warmer weather; the old adage, "in like a lion and out like a lamb" truly suited in Massachusetts. March usually started with freezing termperatures, but it would end with days that reached up into the mid-fifties, the low sixties, when you could trade in your Gore-Tex parka and two pairs of gloves for a light jacket and pocketed hands. Though the wind would still drill right through you until mid-April, when it turned to rain and traded the drill in for a firehose. (Handy advice: the best way to think of dealing with New England weather is this: it wants to knock you down. With heat, cold, wind, or rain, it wants you off your feet, flat on your back. Prepare for that.)

But it was different, going into a New England spring after a New England winter. New England seasons may feel pretty awful, between frigid winters and muggy summers, windy autumn and rainy spring (Though the between-seasons, the transitions bracketing summer, are some of the most sublime climate occasions you may ever know), but they are nonetheless gorgeous. The explosion of green in the spring, the sun-stirred golden-blue skies of summer, the indescribable autumn leaves; even winter there is pretty, because after the snow falls, the clouds clear away and the sunlight dances across the surface of the snow, sparking diamonds from the rounded sleepy contours of winter-stripped bushes and trees; everything soft, everything clean, everything fresh. It feels very much like a sweeping away of the old year, the creation of a clean slate for the building of the new.

Of course, that was twenty years ago, before climate change turned New England into the Guinness Book of snow. I doubt the winters look so rosy these days. Now that they've been through Snowmageddon and Snowpocalypse, what will they call the next indescribably brutal winter storm? Snowdgement Day? The Snapture? Personally, I vote for just using the most common epithet used when New Englanders look out and see the snow still falling, and calling it, "FUCK!"

These days, I live in Oregon. Winter here is not about snow -- when the snow comes, it is only pretty as it is falling, because it melts to slush as soon as it hits the ground, leaving you either with ice or nothing but an empty feeling the next day. Winter here is about gray skies and brown mud, with everything in between water logged and unhappy. It's like being trapped inside the worst school cafeteria burger you ever had, between the gray, cold, slimy Grade E meat (The urban legend at my school was that the box boasted the tagline, "But Edible!") and the soggy grease-soaked bun that disintegrates under your thumb, leaving you knuckle-deep in rancid meat. You chomp down and swallow the first bite because you're hungry; but then you get a good long look at what you're eating and suddenly the burger that seemed too small to fill your stomach becomes much too large to finish. If only I could throw winter away and get an ice cream sandwich instead.

Starting around the middle of November, when the rains come back, every day is cold and damp and depressing. The window is a television after the cable goes out: only one picture, and that one is so depressing that it requires insanity to watch it for more than a few moments. Walking to work, which normally invigorates me in the morning, and walking home, which is twenty minutes of mounting happiness as I leave work behind and move towards my family, becomes a miserable chore: I know my socks will be wet and my pant cuffs mud-streaked. I know my hair will be damp and tangled by wind and rain. I know my hands will be chapped and painful, my coffee will quickly become too cool to warm me up, and on the worst days (of which, thankfully, there are not many), my umbrella will be inadequate and my bag will get soaked, leaving spreading ink stains on all of the papers inside.

The weekends are worse. No, scratch that; I still love my weekends, and thankfully, I love indoor activities, movie watching and book reading and video game playing. I recognize how lucky I am that I have a job that allows me the time to do those things, and a home where I have a reasonably comfortable environment to do them, and most important, a family that allows and even encourages me to do them, rather than dragging me outside into the rain and the mud to go mall-hopping or to kids' soccer games. But the weekends are just that many more hours when I can glance through the windows as I walk from kitchen to living room to den, and catch a glimpse of the sky -- still gray -- and the ground -- still soaked -- and the air in between -- still raining. That many more hours when I don't want to go out, even though there are things I want to do that are not in my home, that cannot be enjoyed from the comfort of my recliner, wrapped in an age-soft robe or comforter. I want to go for a walk, but not on that ground. I do want to go shopping sometimes, especially to the mall in Portland and the glorious Mecca that is Powell's City of Books, but I refuse to drive on wet roads with poor drainage and low visibility when I am surrounded by Oregonians that figure they can just keep driving the same speeds they are used to because -- hey, they're from Oregon, they know how to drive in the rain. They know how to handle this kind of weather, these conditions.

Hey folks: here's a tip. Know how to handle bad driving conditions? SLOW DOWN. To those people who do so, thank you for being sane.

Winter adds an obstacle to everything. It makes getting up in the morning harder, because it is cold and dark, and I know outside is rain and mud. It makes going to work harder, and coming home; it makes grocery shopping into an even more unfortunate chore. It tires me out, which makes me want to nap, but then I feel like I lose what few hours of daylight I do have, and any chance of a dry afternoon walk vanishes; what's worse is it makes me lethargic and therefore unwilling to do work, which then piles up and multiplies my stress -- so that I can't sleep at night for worrying, and am therefore just that much more tired when the next gray morning rolls around, when I look out the window and the entire world is trapped in that moment when the fluorescent light flickers before it comes on, bathing everything in sickly gray-green half-light, almost worse than darkness.

And then it goes on, and on, and on, a Funhouse hall of mirrors that isn't at all fun, a hell of repetition with no discernible end in sight -- until suddenly, sometime between April and July (And no way to tell in that rather large range when it will occur, because Oregon's weathercasters are the epitome of incompetence and predictions based on last year's trends are as worthless as predicting lottery numbers with the same formula, because the trends don't stand up year after year. And because TV weathermen are stupid.), it's just gone. The rain dries up and the sun comes out, the days get warm and the grass needs mowing. Then Oregon doesn't seem so bad; especially after the middle of June, when the school year wraps up and I have the summer ahead of me, two months when I get to live as I want to, and I don't care if people are jealous and think me a lazy and overpaid public school teacher, I think summer vacation is worth killing for.

But right now, in the first third of March, when I only have Spring Break to look forward to -- and believe me, I'm looking forward to it -- but the sure knowledge that that week is going to be just as gray and miserable and suffocating as the last sixteen weeks have been, as though I have been trapped under an avalanche, or maybe a Vesuvius-worth of ash, and must try to dig out from under the weight of inevitability, using any trick I can just to find some breathing room, and never knowing how much farther I have to go -- will it be April this year? Or June, as it was last year? Punxatawney Phil has become my enemy, the thrice-damned lying tease -- before I break free and emerge into sunlight; that makes Spring Break seem like little more than a pause in the suffering. Especially knowing how much school there is left afterwards, with increasingly antsy and obnoxious students -- not that I can blame them, not after the winter they just went through right along with me. Spring Break will be that moment in the afternoon when your nose opens up and you feel energy creeping back into your limbs, and you manage to convince yourself that you're getting better, that maybe you've finally beaten this head cold after all, and tomorrow will be the day you feel better. . .

Sniff. Cough. Nope. Not yet.