Season Change

People keep saying that the weather has been unusually mild this fall. I was running in short sleeves last Saturday, even at seven in the morning, and the leaves took surprisingly long to change to full color. The weather keeps teasing us, and there have been several times that I’ve thought it had finally turned, only to shed my coat again the very next day.

This time I think I might be right, and even if I’m not I am still beginning to realize that winter really is going to come eventually, and that it terrifies me. This morning as I drove back from a student teacher observation I noticed a local park, really sort of a miniature forest, and for the first time realized that the trees stretching up against the sky are completely barren. Now, not all of the trees in Ann Arbor are barren yet, but for the last week or two the streets and sidewalks have been lined with mounds and mounds of yellow leaves, more than I’ve ever seen before (even in Virginia!), and the trees are starting to exhibit their loss.

And there’s wind now, too. I’ve been anticipating the Ann Arbor winter for about a year now and somehow it never really clicked that there was going to be wind. This morning it was just over forty degrees when I stepped out the door, but it felt like thirty. And when it gets windy my windows no longer do their job properly. Several weeks ago I rearranged my room because my bed was positioned exactly below the two windows in my bedroom. Aesthetically and practically that is the best place for it, and it took about twenty minutes of staring around at my furniture to figure out how I could possibly have it otherwise. But it was just too cold at night, even with the thermostat turned up, and if it was that bad in the early fall cold snaps I didn’t want to imagine what it would be like come January or February. I finally shifted my bed to the other side of the room and my head is now right by a little opening in the wall where I’m absolutely positive the spiders live (though I’ll admit I have yet to see a single one). It made it very hard for me to fall a sleep for the first few nights in my bed’s new position.

But even opposite the windows where I am now I can still feel a chilly breeze when the wind blows. Apparently in Michigan everyone puts plastic insulation over their windows in the wintertime. It’s a good thing I have a roommate to tell me these things because it would never have occurred to me—they don’t do that in Utah (and they certainly don’t do that in California). It seems strange that a thin sheet of plastic will keep the cold air out and the gas bill down…and it seems even stranger that you’d have to take such defensive measures against the elements. It scares me a little.

I don’t do well with the cold. My tolerance for cold has dropped drastically over the last several years. This is counterintuitive, given that I’ve spent those last few years in a colder climate than the one I grew up in, and even managed to survive the biggest blizzard in Washington D.C. in a hundred years. But my dislike of winter weather has steadily increased over time to the point that I genuinely dread the season. I once had a roommate who was just the opposite—we had thermostat wars (which was okay, because we had managed to become very good friends before the cold weather hit) and I remember once spending a miserable night too cold to fall asleep but too tired to wake up enough to change the thermostat. The next morning I discovered that the thermostat was set on fifty degrees—fifty degrees! That was comfortable for her. (To my delight, this roommate is now serving a mission in Phoenix, Arizona, and in one letter she confessed that seventy degrees was starting to feel a bit chilly.)

Her advice to me was to embrace the cold. “You just think too much about being cold,” she told me, “and that makes things worse,” and I think she’s right. If I step outside and it’s cold (and especially if it’s windy) all I can think is, I hate this, I hate this, I hate this, and all winter long I just imagine how wonderful the summer will be (and unlike other anticipated pleasures, summer never disappoints me). I recognize that putting so much focus on my misery only augments it, and so I have occasionally tried to follow her advice and embrace the cold. I try to let myself feel the cold air on my arms or my face or whatever happens to be exposed and to not think of it as an unpleasant sensation, but rather as something that just is. It works for a minute or two, but not much longer. I don't have that kind of will power.

On Sunday our Relief Society president taught the lesson. She began by standing up and saying, “We’re about to enter winter, which for me is the most absolutely miserable, depressing time of year.” That’s not encouraging. It’s even less encouraging that when I tell people how terrified I am of the winter, they don’t shrug and say, “Oh, it’s not so bad.” Instead they say, “Yeah, it’s pretty miserable. And it lasts forever.” Great. Just what I want to hear.

But then, maybe it’s like going to the movies. If you’ve heard that a movie is horrible, it’s not hard for it to exceed your expectations. In fact, maybe I ought to approach it the way I approached Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. My purple roommate had proclaimed it the worst movie she’d ever seen, and so when she got some friends together to go see it in order to validate her claim, I was bound and determined to disagree with her. I ended up loving every minute of it. Maybe if everyone is telling me what an awful time of year the winter is, I can decide to disagree, adamantly, ahead of time. Of course, I don’t know if I’m really capable of this—a lot less rests on a three hour movie than on five months of an inescapable environment.

So wish me luck, because I think it’s about to start.