My Winter Of Discontent

I won't lie to you.  I'm gonna tell you right up front that I dislike winter intensely.  As you should be able to tell from the photo above, summer is my favorite week here in Maine.  The more I think about it, the more obvious it has become that summer beats winter in every category.  I'll take a heat wave over a cold snap every time.  Why?  Well, for starters I don't have to scrape heat off my car's windshield in the morning.  I don't have to pay some guy to plow heat off my driveway so I can get out.  I don't have to shovel a path through the heat to get to my studio.  I save $3.58 a gallon every time my oil burner doesn't run.  I don't wonder if I'm dressed warmly enough to go out and check the mail.  And speaking of wearing enough clothes; going to the beach is alot more fun in the summer than the winter.

Now, some people say that heat makes people lethargic, that if it's too warm people just stand around and nobody wants to do any work.  That, I say, is just an urban myth started by people watching DOT road crews.  Everybody else is way more active in the summer.  You can actually see folks smile more because their faces aren't covered by ski masks.  Everyone has a spring in their step-- because their feet aren't weighed down by heavy boots.  Really, need I go on?

This winter has been an especially difficult one for me.  Somewhere under the four feet of snow in my yard lies my back.  I threw it out in January while shoveling yet another foot of snow and I haven't been able to find it.  So for weeks I've been walking around like someone who's looking for a lost contact lens.  As soon as I started to straighten up, I got hit with one of the worst head colds I've ever experienced.  Fifteen days of phlegm!  I was looking like a human mucus fountain.  At one point, I went through two new boxes of Kleenex in a six hour period.  (I should have bought stock in the company!)  The skin of my red, swollen, blistered nose had the same texture as pleather.  Every word I spoke had B in it, ie; "I'b jubst trybin' toob breathe-b!"

Needless to say, my work suffered.  It wasn't easy to stumble down to my frigid studio, warm it up, and get to work.  All I really wanted to do was lie crumpled in a corner with my boxes of tissues, a warm blanket and a hot toddy, and just let it pass.  If truth be told, I did just that on more than one day.  But you can only wallow in your own misery (and snot) for so long, so after a while I managed to suck it up and get back to work.

The good news is that tomorrow is the last day of February.  The bad, is that in Maine, March is the cruelest month.  As eager as we are for spring, we will undoubtedly have at least one or two more big snowstorms.  That's OK, though.   I know what is yet to come, and for that I say, bring it on!

                                                                  THINK SPRING!

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