Winter Lessons

Arabella wants to know when we will plant tomatoes and play in the yard and catch butterflies and pick flowers. Not until spring and summer, I say. It is summer, she says. In her logic, the snow is gone, so winter must be over. I try to explain that winter is a set amount of time, and even if it is warm, if the calendar says January, it really is winter. She does not believe me.

Her logic is solid, but incorrect. Last week we had record high temperatures for January in Indiana. It was warmer here than in L.A, where I grew up. I try to explain that I grew up in a place where it didn't snow, not even in winter.

In fact, the jr. high luau was always set for January, when the weather was always clear and mild. I used to always go roller skating in the grocery store parking lot on New Year's day, after watching the Rose Parade a 20 minute drive away (because if you ask an Angeleno, everything is 20 minutes away). My fairy godmother, a New York native, always insisted on having a fire in the fireplace on Christmas day, so I remember at least one Christmas dinner with the a/c on, sweaty in my new Laura Ashley wool dress. My apartment in grad school had a heater, but I never lit the pilot, it was never cold enough to need it. I used to look at the Currier and Ives-esque images on cookie tins and wonder what it would be like to live in the snowy climates. Did kids still have to go to school? Did they have to snow-shoe in? I laughed when a friend in New Orleans, who had moved south from upstate New York and Bucks County, PA, still had her favorite ice scraper.

Now I feel like an old hand at this snow thing. I own flannel-lined jeans (who knew? what a blessing), I have an ice-scraper of my own (and I think my friend keeping her favorite had a point), and knitting with wool seems reasonable. I'm still a cold weather weenie, but I have acclimated.