As I write this, it’s snowing here on my drawbridge. It’s not going to stick. (Please, God, don’t let it stick.) If it does, I’ll have to shovel it. People have been known to have heart attacks while shoveling their driveways. Now imagine having to shovel the equivalent of 14 driveways. It’s one of the few moments when I hate this job.
So far, it’s not sticking. I’m just having to put up with below freezing temps while sitting in a room with more windows than walls. And I’m being serenaded by the sound of constantly running water because the last thing on earth a bridge operator needs is no access to a functioning toilet for 8 hours. Our pipes are exposed for the entire length of the bridge, so they freeze long before other pipes do.
The sound of the flowing water is kind of hypnotic. It’s like white noise. But it reminds me of the cold. You can never quite get warm in this tower.
I don’t know why I’m being such a whiny little brat about it. I know people across the country are experiencing much worse weather. Not all that far from me, the mountain passes are closing. And 20 degrees isn’t that cold in the overall scheme of things.
Maybe I was in Florida too long. Being there 39 years out of my total 59 probably fiddled with my temperature tolerances a bit. I’m quite sure it fiddled with my mental health.
Still, I’d rather be cold than hot any day. You can always put on more clothes (if you have them.) You can’t always take more off. And menopause can sometimes make frigid weather seem like a relative concept. There are winter nights when I’ve stood on my back patio in short sleeves and basked in the luxury of a frigid wind, while Dear Husband looked on in horror. Unfortunately, you can’t schedule your hot flashes for climatically convenient moments.
I have had some interesting experiences with cold, though.
❄ One time when I was in Jacksonville, Florida, the temperature dropped 20 degrees in a matter of minutes. I didn’t know this. I just thought I was getting sick. And then I turned on the news that evening to discover that many of the car windshields in the downtown area had shattered as a result. I’m glad I wasn’t driving.
❄ I can tell you from personal experience that there’s nothing as boring as being a 9-year-old stuck indoors during a week-long ice storm. To hell with the potential for falling trees and power lines. There is a Dr. Zhivago-like world of beauty just outside your window, and yet you feel trapped.
❄ I was in my early 20’s before I realized that mine was not the only mother who determined my need for extra layers based on her own zero-body-fat and sedentary interpretation of the weather. “I feel cold. You should put on a coat.”
❄ And some frozen laws of physics seem to defy logic. In an attempt to create Ice Ballo0n Orbs two years ago, I discovered that water is much more likely to freeze when surrounded by cold air than it will when buried in a snow bank. Go figure.
❄ I wouldn’t make a good extreme survivalist. I shouldn’t even be driving in cold weather. If you’d like to hear about one frozen commute in which I had six brushes with death, you can read all about it here.
❄ Speaking of brushes with death, the coldest I’ve ever been was in Fairbanks, Alaska. Forty below zero was not the temperature outdoors that day, but there’s a place in that city where fools like me can pay to walk into a cooler-on-steroids to see what -40 degrees is like. I have no clue why we thought this was a good idea, but we did it.
Fun fact. -40 degrees is the only time when Fahrenheit and Celsius are the same. Maybe it’s because it renders both systems nonsensical, as it did me. I think we were only in there for about 20 seconds, just long enough for the venue operators to take a picture of us through the frosty glass. But it seemed like an eternity.
At that temperature, your body feels like it’s being attacked, and in truth, that’s absolutely correct. You can die just by breathing the air in times like that. Your mind is screaming, “Nope! Nope! Nope!” and you feel physical pain from your eyeballs to your toenails.
I think I went into a tiny bit of shock. My inner voice was wanting to know what I had gone and done to thrust myself into such a vortex of frozen-over hell. And then, just like that, we were out of there, giggling nervously, and back in human tolerance range. I silently thanked Jack Frost for his merciful neglect all these years
I’ve never shared this picture with anyone because it’s not very flattering for me (where as Dear Husband, dammit, always looks good). You can see that my entire face is attempting to retreat into my warm cranial cavity. I only keep this picture to remind myself that, yes. I was there, and that once was enough.
Stay warm, dear reader.
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