(no subject)
I forget this thing exists sometimes. That's what happens when 90% of your friends list goes dead for months a at a time, if not permanently.
Winter, winter. All the seasons mean something to me. That's one thing that Tacoma doesn't have versus Omaha. Tacoma's seasons are so subtle as to be effectively grouped into two: wet and dry. From May to October, it's sunny and warm, and the rest of the time it's cold and wet. Here... the seasonal differences are extreme, each thoroughly distinct in character and effects. I value that immensely.
The winter in which I finished cooking was cold, very cold. My mother likes to tell stories of falling on the ice while pregnant with me. Looking back at the weather on the day of my birth, it was cold, although not outrageously so: temperatures in the below freezing (but not sub-zero) range and foggy/cloudy. Today, twenty-eight years later, it is equally overcast, but far colder; at sunrise it was -9˚ F and struggled to crack zero all day. As it was not all that cold earlier this week and will be in the forties later, I consider the cold itself a gift.
Extreme cold is a friend to me. It is close kin of the extreme heat of the desert. Both exceptionally dry, both pure. They focus the senses in a way few other phenomena can. Both remind you of your fragility and mortality. They can suck the life out of you, one way or another. I find both comforting reminders of everything that I love about life. Comfort is enjoyable, desirable, but ultimately numbing; hit with the oven-like blast of the Utah desert in midsummer's noontime, or the sub-zero blasts of midwinter arctic air in Omaha, and I am reminded of how precious life is. I relish it, truly.
Snow, sleet, ice, freezing fog, gale-force winds barreling down the plains from the pole...
Few things are as comforting to me as the howl of those winds through the bare trees as I stand by the frozen creek, at night when the cold is worst, clouds racing across stars shivering in the crystal-clear skies. I am at home here in the winter.
As I am in spring's storms, summer's heat, and autumn's cool rains. As much as I truly despise being stuck here... I love the land. The land is as much a part of me as anything. I hate the people and their ridiculous conservative Christian values, but the land... the land and I... we are one, for better or worse.
Winter, winter. All the seasons mean something to me. That's one thing that Tacoma doesn't have versus Omaha. Tacoma's seasons are so subtle as to be effectively grouped into two: wet and dry. From May to October, it's sunny and warm, and the rest of the time it's cold and wet. Here... the seasonal differences are extreme, each thoroughly distinct in character and effects. I value that immensely.
The winter in which I finished cooking was cold, very cold. My mother likes to tell stories of falling on the ice while pregnant with me. Looking back at the weather on the day of my birth, it was cold, although not outrageously so: temperatures in the below freezing (but not sub-zero) range and foggy/cloudy. Today, twenty-eight years later, it is equally overcast, but far colder; at sunrise it was -9˚ F and struggled to crack zero all day. As it was not all that cold earlier this week and will be in the forties later, I consider the cold itself a gift.
Extreme cold is a friend to me. It is close kin of the extreme heat of the desert. Both exceptionally dry, both pure. They focus the senses in a way few other phenomena can. Both remind you of your fragility and mortality. They can suck the life out of you, one way or another. I find both comforting reminders of everything that I love about life. Comfort is enjoyable, desirable, but ultimately numbing; hit with the oven-like blast of the Utah desert in midsummer's noontime, or the sub-zero blasts of midwinter arctic air in Omaha, and I am reminded of how precious life is. I relish it, truly.
Snow, sleet, ice, freezing fog, gale-force winds barreling down the plains from the pole...
Few things are as comforting to me as the howl of those winds through the bare trees as I stand by the frozen creek, at night when the cold is worst, clouds racing across stars shivering in the crystal-clear skies. I am at home here in the winter.
As I am in spring's storms, summer's heat, and autumn's cool rains. As much as I truly despise being stuck here... I love the land. The land is as much a part of me as anything. I hate the people and their ridiculous conservative Christian values, but the land... the land and I... we are one, for better or worse.