It used to bewilder me that so many people who have lived all of their lives in the heartland of the country would choose, upon retirement, to uproot themselves from all of the goodness they had known here and transplant themselves to places like to Florida, California or Arizona- presumably for a life of golf outings and parchesi tournaments amidst complete strangers who might over time come to be regarded, at best, as fairly close acquaintances. I’m not really being fair here, and I’ve come to a grudging realization that life in the sunny climates can be as meaningful as you make it, but I’m still mystified that so many midwesterners are willing to undergo all the expense and hassle required to transplant themselves from Racine, WI to Palm Beach, FL. upon retirement. Why?
Look at the photo above and think about numbers like 35 mile an hour winds and minus 35 degrees wind chill and 12 inches of snow in 12 hours and you have at least a big part of the answer. Winter when it’s gentle is such a beautiful thing – and when it turns potent, it’s actually kind of fun and presents a satisfying challenge. But when Winter turns brutal, it has even the heartiest Wisconsinite peering at brochures for Sunny Breezes Retirement Village in Coppertone, Florida with longing and envy.
Most of you reading this have tasted winter’s iron grip over the last few days, so you don’t need a sermonette on the topic from me. In fact, the misery has reached its icy grasp as far away as Seattle, where my brother Steve and his family have been hunkered down in their house, essentially stranded because of wintery conditions that have made the many steep hills of Seattle all but impossible to navigate. And this has been going on for days. I don’t think they’re yet eating the bark off of the trees or burning their furniture for warmth, but Steve also did say that when you’re under siege like this there is part of you that wonders if it is ever going to get better again or if we have finally slipped into a new Ice Age and are all going to be abandoning our Saabs for Sled Dogs from here on out.
Winter first visited us Friday morning – a snow day for Kathy and for me as well since Gateway Technical College (which owns WGTD) was shut down as well because of the huge snowfall. But at least it was pretty and picturesque- and in fact Saturday night, as Kathy and I were making our way up to the Racine Theater Guild to watch the last fifteen minutes of “Beauty and the Beast” (we’d been at the Kenosha Pops Band concert before that) I actually said to her “I love winter when it’s like this – with a blanket of snow on the ground, no wind, and comfortable temperatures where you barely need a coat.” I don’t know how or why Mother Nature took offense at my remarks, but later that very night she unleashed a savage blast of bitterly cold temperatures and horrendous winds that transformed most of Wisconsin from a Thomas Kincaide landscape into a scene from a science fiction disaster thriller.
We knew it was going to be bad when we awoke Sunday morning (we’d seen the forecast) but I was not prepared for the sight of those drifts in our driveway- drifts that were nearly five feet tall at their highest. The problem is that when you stand in the middle of our driveway and look west, you can see cornfields – and absolutely nothing standing in the way of the wind. It has a completely clear shot and by the time the wind reaches our humble abode, it feels like the kind of wind that drives pipe cleaners through steel girders. Now I’m starting to wonder why one of our neighbors asked us not long after they moved into the neighborhood “so why did you pick that particular lot to build your house?” He posed the question with this tone of voice that implied that we had chosen poorly. At the time, we felt like saying “we picked it because it was the best lot in the whole neighborhood, you nimrod!” Now I feel like answering “well, we love this lot in the spring, summer and fall, but it sure is a booger when winter hits!” (Excuse the salty language.)
Thank goodness for the Toro, which got a good workout twice that day but worked like a charm. (It sounds weird to call such a rugged piece of machinery a “charm” but there you go.) It got us out of the house this morning so I could get to church for a couple of rehearsals – and then again later in the afternoon when we rendezvoused with Polly and Mark and two other couples with whom we had planned to do our annual Christmas caroling. We were in complete agreement that caroling when the wind chill is -35 is the surest way to be the subject of one of those news stories that begins “finally, a tragic story out of Racine, Wisconsin. Eight kind souls who were just trying to spread a little Christmas cheer. . . “ You can fill in the rest. So we took ourselves out to Applebees for a celebratory supper, in anticipation of the caroling which will finally happen tomorrow evening when temperatures are expected to be a balmy 27 degrees. (That is, if the thermometer remembers how to climb above zero.) It would have been easiest for all of us to just stay home, of course – and I don’t think what drew us out into that brutal cold was the Tomato Basil Soup. (Although it is amazingly good on a cold day – I was halfway tempted to just pour it into my lap and warm up that way) It was the desire to be together with friends – because nothing says “nyaah nyaah nyaah” in the face of Old Man Winter like eight friends around a table, laughing and hugging and defying the worst that Winter can inflict on us.
pictured above: me with my new sidekick, Toro.