Take that

This post is in response to a certain blogger’s executive order that our posts are not cheery enough for her, and that we should suck it up and entertain her.

It’s the freakin end of Feb. OK it’s actually the beginning of March, but with 15 feet of snow and all, so what? What do you expect from a hoard of winter-bound people? Every year, as fall advances, we party hearty with a sense of quiet desperation, promising each other that this year will be different. For once, we won’t let the cold and the snow and the ice get to us, we’ll keep getting together for wild parties, none of us will go into hibernation mode and stay in bed for days on end. But after a few months, like new year's resolutions we can’t maintain, we go down, turning as bitter as the weather. The ghostly white face staring back from the mirror erases any memories of ever having danced happily in the sun, fit and tanned, unbound from 42 layers of clothing. We forget what color is, as we make extremely brief forays out of our houses only when we’ve run out of essentials, such as olives and eucalyptus. The dark, gray days seep into our souls, leaving us feeling as bleak as the landscape.

For the last three years, I resided in the tropics or semi tropics. No such luck this year. I pinned all my hopes on avoiding that end-of-winter funk by escaping the cold for a few weeks, only to have the absolute worst vacation of my life, making me dearly wish I’d stayed home to get blown down and across the ice for a quarter mile before coming to a crashing halt up against a good solid snow drift that saved me from slipping straight into the frigid ocean whipped wild by a howling chill wind.

Oh you lucky people who live where it’s not so terribly mood destroying cold. Patience. Spring is coming, and with it, our moods and our posts will improve.