It's Cold Outside Baby

I'm not sure where you may be reading this but here in New England we've been having some cold weather. It doesn't look like it will go above freezing for a week. Now most people think it's seriously cold and it's been a topic of many conversations.

I was gearing up for it and the last couple of days I've been having these random flashes of memories from my childhood. You know what it is? After I left home for college and then into the real world and the various places I've lived around the country, that even though I moved back to the east coast, I hadn't come back to what I think of as winter. Yes it snows here in Boston and it gets cold and you have to shovel and scrape your car but it's winter-lite. This is the first moment of what I consider a real winter that I have experienced in almost 20 years!

Where I grew up - way up north, when it was winter it was cold like this most of winter, the few times it got a little warmer was when we got snow. I love to say that I grew up in a land where it was often to cold to snow.

So now I've shifted from gearing up for some really cold weather to looking forward to it. I enjoy remembering back. To the countless mornings waiting out front of the school for the doors to open up. You learned to stand perfectly straight and still so that your legs didn't touch the fabric of your pants. And you had fun crunching your hair or friends' that had frozen from the morning shower because they hadn't spent time blowing it dry completely.

Remembering the tricks of walking in the cold. We'd walk home after school and you learned to take one of your textbooks out of your backpack and hold it in front of your chest. Three hundred pages of paper make for good insulation.

We also knew the best route home - not the shortest but the one where there were strategic placed spaces we could pop in for heat and to warm back up. First was the public library, than the convenience store on the corner, than the lobby of a law office. Than there was a big stretch, another corner store and than home.

I'd forgotten a lot of this until this last week and the weather triggered the memories. Of course, there is a lot of nostalgia wrapped up in all this although I really don't remember negatives associated with the cold. I was born into it so that was just the way things were. You knew no different. It's nice to have the cold weather back. Although I suspect I'll be grumbling about it when the heating bill comes in. Another nice thing about back then - I didn't have to pay the bills!