The snow is beautiful, but for some reason this year I don’t seem to care. Not yet, anyway, and certainly not this Monday morning. Maybe fourteen years of digging out, hacking at icy windshields, and slopping through the mud and slush have done their job. Here in Taos, this attitude will get you zero sympathy or worse! I need to get a handle on this fast, before the Snow Police come knocking at my door.
It’s not that I’m cold, because I’m not. In fact, our little home is so much warmer with the wood stove than our old house in Maryland ever was in what passed for winter there. The adobe walls are thick and solid. There’s no such thing as drafts. So I don’t know where this mood or state of mind has come from, and I hope it goes away.
Winter isn’t even here yet, for pity’s sake, and I’m already whining! This will never do. No one will read my blog or buy my books. People will cross to the other side of the street when they see me coming. I’ll stop shaving and brushing my teeth. My wife will leave me. Even the junk mail will stop. And all because the Earth is tilted as it moves around the sun.
John Hamilton Farr lives at 7,000 feet in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. As New York Times best-selling author James C. Moore tells it, John is “a man attuned to the world who sees it differently than you and I and writes about it with a language and a vision of life that is impossible to ignore.” This JHFARR.COM site is the master writing archive. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on .png)
I’m sitting here now listening to ice breaking off the oak tree outside and hitting the house. It’s warming up, 34 expected today. I used to love cold weather and took every opportunity to get in my Jeep and drive around the pasture. Now, I just sit here, waiting for the sun to come out. It hasn’t been out much the past week. That makes me kind of grumpy.
I’ve been thinking about years ago when I lived in Arizona. Maybe I’ll go back one day.
Ice is falling off the trees here, too, and thonking against the skylight. I dunno, man. There’s definitely an element of “been there, done that” to my winter this year. Meanwhile the ski freaks are whooping it up, realtors and hot tub salesmen make fools of themselves on social media, and I hide out from lynch mobs.
i have the same attitude, John. not even fighting it. dreaming of moving to a tropical beach!
I don’t know what it is, I really don’t. But this year I just feel numb about the snow, and that’s on top of my usual the-holidays-can-go-to-hell stance.
My youngest daughter lived in Hawaii for 5 years, so last January, after digging out of a FIVE FOOT snow that nearly killed me, I went with them to the Big Island for three months and lived in a rat-infested jung-alow with the wild pigs and learned about rat-lung decease and how to avoid having your car broken into by meth-nics. Everywhere you go there is something. I have been thinking about moving back to Arkansas and rejoining the ticks and chiggers. Pick your poison.
Thanks for the Hawaii report. 🙂 That’s about what I figured. For the record, we’re not contemplating relocating, although that could happen if we caught a break or saw an actual opportunity. And you’re absolutely right about picking your poison. That’s why this isn’t something one can game or strategize so everything is perfect. There’s always going to be a price to pay.
Some years I hardly notice winter. Maybe because I came from Colorado and never knew anything else. This year it seems like two weeks since last winter. It’s pretty on Christmas cards but you have to shovel it off the sidewalk and uncover the car. Sometimes I imagine living in an apartment with a carport. After 21 years of Taos the primitive charm of roughing it wears off. Also I’m older. But I too am lucky to live in adobe. At least its warm.
“This year it seems like two weeks since last winter.” EXACTLY!
Colorado, eh? I guess you’ve heard the one about the four seasons in Colorado: winter, winter, winter, and construction. 🙂
Well, actually Colorado has four seasons but they all happen at the same time. The construction thing is true. Here in Taos construction happens downtown in the middle of tourist season. A territorial statement I suppose.
“Well, actually Colorado has four seasons but they all happen at the same time.” Okay, you win.
Everybody has a gripe about the weather where they live! I have lived in places, I couldn’t wait to leave only to find out there are worse! I take winter, I live in Texas where you bake to death! Several months with temps over 100 degrees makes you love that snow. We definitely do the rain dance here in the summer. It is torture with the hot weather and you have to pay for it with high air conditioning bills, ugly dried up yards, rattlesnakes trying to come and get your pets. You have just forgotten your days living in the inferno. Just enjoy that pretty snow picture outside. Good time to write that novel!
All true, especially that last part.
I’ve lived in Texas, remember. Also born there. Got my hippie ticket stamped in Austin in the late ’60s. Hardly anybody’s apartment had air conditioning. I recall a week of 110 °F during the day and 100 at night, flopping around on the bed with the fan blowing, pretending to sleep. Maryland was actually worse, because of the humidity. I can’t stand it being hot and humid. At least the winter here is almost always sunny. That makes such a huge difference. Up in Iowa, where my wife is from, it can be overcast for days and days during the darkest part of the year. No fun at all.
You know, at the Solstices I often imagine what if…what if the planet didn’t tip back again, what if it just kept on tipping, and what then? So every December 22 or June 22 I say a little something to the great something and hope that the way things are will continue as they are. Except bugger the three weeks in the UK either side of it. Grey, or what.
You’re probably the only reason we haven’t tumbled over yet. Don’t know what I’d do with six weeks of grey (gray?). Isn’t that when Brits head for Spain? 🙂
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