Been inside for a good ten minutes now, and my hands still ache from the cold.
There's a full moon out there and I just had to go take a look.
Poured a glass of wine and reached into my left pants pocket, felt the lighter warm and snug down in there.
Crept out the back door, trying my best not to wake anyone.
My brother's cat out on the back porch startled me.
I threw the thick orange scarf around my neck and then lugged the big blue parka up, over, and on to me, and then I stepped outside.
It's been a long winter up here in upstate New York.
The weather folks say our temps may hit the low 40's here sometime next week. They say the mercury hasn't hit 40 in Albany since January 18, in Glens Falls since January 5. I live about halfway between those two places, so let's say I haven't seen a single moment when the temperature outside has been as high as 40 degrees in two months.
It was cold before then, too.
Let's say I've been above forty for maybe one or two days out of the past ninety.
And there's been plenty of snow.
Haven't seen a winter this deep since 92-93, back when I lived with my boy Dan on Chestnut Street. That year we got a foot of snow a week for most of January and February, and a mid-March blizzard brought us another two and a half feet to top it all off. We used to sit in the living room, drink beer and get high while looking out through curtain-less windows at the snow coming down, The Jayhawks' "Hollywood Town Hall" blaring in the background.
I had just embarked on this trans-Atlantic love affair that would eventually walk me down the aisle. For most of the winter I had a job photocopying every trademark on file in the New York Department of State's offices on Washington Avenue. They had a smoke room, I'd make a few copies and then go for a smoke break, bust out my notebook and work on my next love letter. Women in the office would come in and visit, I guess smoking was unfortunately a lot more common back then. They'd ask me what I was writing and I'd tell them, relishing any excuse to talk about it.
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It's easy to say you don't like the winter, and easy to see why you'd say it. It gets relentlessly goddamn cold. Driving on snowy roads flat-out sucks. By late January, pretty much everyone you meet in upstate New York will be quick to offer up a negative comment on winter.
And there's me.
I come not bury winter, but praise it.
This is not a popular sentiment around here.
My own wife, who I do love dearly, just the other day said, after coming in from the cold, "Dave, what the fuck are we doing here?"
That wasn't some sort of metaphorical question, by the way.
I knew, the way you start to after a few years together, exactly what she meant before a quarter of the sentence was out of her mouth.
She meant, what the fuck are we doing in this ridiculously fucking cold town in upstate New York when we theoretically could be living in many places way less ridiculously fucking cold than this place?
But I'm rooted here, I'm not going anywhere.
"Send me a letter when you get there," I said.
My mother's parents came here as children, on a boat, in the middle of World War I, not knowing what to expect but their parents expecting something better than they were getting as peasants in the hills outside Naples.
My father, meanwhile, has traced the paternal side of his family living this far north all the way back to the 1680's.
Upstate's way back in the blood on both sides.
I'm not going anywhere.
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For my money, there's nothing better than spring in upstate New York, especially a spring that comes after a long winter.
One day you're freezing your ass off, and two weeks later, you're outside, snow melting so fast you can hear it, walking around in a jean jacket, feeling like a new man just because the temperatures have risen into the low fifties.
Yeah, I've lived through some winters, some of them literal and some of them metaphorical, and some that combined the two.
Spring always comes, literally and metaphorically, and that makes the winters of either sort beautiful and worth every last freezing second.
Feeling the warmth of a late March breeze, feeling the warmth of the sort of kiss you'd once thought you'd never feel again, hell yeah.
It's as cold as hell out there right now, but the moon is full and high and bright, and I gotta get back out there: it'll be gone before you know it.