In the midst of winter I found there was, within me, another winter, a winter that had crept in through my window and made for itself a cold palace of ice. And that makes me frightened. For it says that no matter how hard the furnace pushes against it, there’s something stronger—something even more Arctic, pushing right back.
[With apologies to Camus.]
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Bonus pic: here’s me back in my bike commuting days, having just made it home at minus 19 degrees (Celsius; -2.2 Fahrenheit) on a frigid January night. This was during the so-called ‘Polar Vortex’ winter of 2013-2014, when temperatures were frigid for weeks. I’d leave home at about noon, with temperatures having ‘warmed up’ to -15 or so, and return home at about 10 pm. This was, I think, my coldest ride (the nightly lows of -24 or lower didn’t hit until after midnight).
That winter changed me in some lasting ways. More than a decade later, the cold still doesn’t bother me: that winter, I developed a strange respect for it that seemed reciprocated. It’s hard to describe, that sense of accepting the cold on its terms and asking it to permit me safe passage across its terrain. I no longer bike in the winter, though, and that balaclava is currently in deep storage.
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Ooh: and another bonus pic. This is me with our child, heading off to school that winter, at about minus 24 Celsius. The worst thing on these mornings wasn’t the cold: it was that the sidewalks were a glare of ice.
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[I’ve been dismantling my Facebork account the lazy way, by checking in regularly to delete everything posted on a given day via the helpful ‘Memories’ widget. Anything worth saving gets downloaded; items still worth sharing occasionally appear here.]