Here Comes Winter

If my daughter checks the weather radar and the National Weather Service reports and predictions eight to ten times a day, she’ll be following in her father’s footsteps. If she checks them only that often she’ll also be showing a great deal of restraint, compared to him.

Tonight, a warm front has passed, and the woodstove that was keeping us comfortably toasty three hours ago is rendering us faintly sweaty and anxious. Of course, by morning a cold front and the relatively frigid air behind it will cool down the house again and let me run the stove as hot as I like to.

If I do impart my love of the four seasons to my daughter, I’ll probably make the biggest fuss over winter. Not only are pond-skating, snowball fights, sledding, and snowboarding exotic and other-worldly to someone like myself who was raised in coastal California but they are also suggestive of truly cosmic mysteries. For scientists are still struggling to explain the presence of water on Earth. I side with those who say it came from comets slamming into our planet during its late infancy. But you have to admit that all the oceans on earth and all the rivers and lakes and clouds would have had to come from quite a number of quite large snow cones. That the water freezes up again in tiny crystals that flutter in the air and accumulate as a fluffy, quieting quilt when they land on the earth’s mantel is fantastic enough to remove half the pain of modernity every time it happens.