Winter

I used to live where winter meant snow and ice. In Ann Arbor, Michigan. Walking across the law school quad in a long, brown, wool coat. Too many years ago and before Patagonia. My grey, 2002 never left the parking lot behind my apartment. I only remember studying inside warm libraries or my tiny living room.

 In Racine, Wisconsin there was the tiny cottage, just up from the lake. I had an internship at The Racine Journal Times. I worked from a small office, in Burlington, Wisconsin. A town of less than 10,000. A 40-minute drive from Racine. There was only my editor, Don, and me and the secretary whose name I can't remember. I do remember her surprise that I was Jewish. That I did not believe in Jesus and such. She had bible study class regularly and what I imagined was a very restrained marriage. She was probably younger than my 20 some years. She liked me, though could not understand me. We talked. She was concerned that I would go to Hell for not believing as she did. Eventually, as my tenure ended, she was reassured that I would survive and my beliefs could be tolerated.

 The cottage where I lived was not winterized. There was plastic on the windows and the wind made too much noise at night. I had found the sublet when I was in a local grocery store, and a couple overheard me ask the clerk if he knew of a place I could rent until December. That I was a journalism graduate student from the University of Michigan and looking to plant myself in Burlington, this resort town with the lake, not far from Chicago. The couple rented me their summer cottage.

 It was cold…inside. There were space heaters. I took a warm bath almost every night. I met Judith too. She lived in a converted school house which fed my fantasy of living in barns or other such converted structures. She was an artist and a teacher. Single and bohemian for this conservative town. She was a bit older and she helped me survive winter.

 My brother came to visit. On his way to various medical school interviews. Dad was worried Charlie didn't shower often enough to make a good impression. No matter that he had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford. My parents visited from the place where it never snowed. And then John came, my fiancée who now lived in Greeley, Colorado. The winter place I would move to after finishing Wisconsin and earning my Ann Arbor degree.

Winter in Colorado sounded romantic and athletic and pristine. It was, sometimes. We also lived in a cottage, this one across the street from a tiny café which featured rich, dense and doughy cinnamon buns. Winter in Colorado meant I could wear the Antartex, sheepskin coat my mother had bought me before Ann Arbor and Greeley. There had been a stint in Boston. Another winter tucked between Santa Cruz, graduate school and my wedding. All those winters.

It is winter now in San Francisco. The winter of my discontent? Or is it the summer? The temperature hovers at 50 or so, on the coldest mornings. Now I wear lots of down and Patagonia. Inside I still take lots of baths. "Warm water is good medicine, soak in it." The line on a jar of bath salts I bought at the beginning of the pandemic. I still sit in the bathtub several late nights a week. It is the closest I come to memories of snowy walks across campus or deicing the lock on the door of my 2002 or driving to the mountains to ski with the husband I wanted to love more than I did.

 I miss the snow sometimes, but really what I miss is the way it marked time and created contrast. Last winter was unlike any other I have lived through. No sheepskin coat required to stay warm while clearing a snow-covered windshield in order to drive across the flatness to a job at Aims Community College in Greeley, Colorado. As hard as those winters were, as I struggled to grow into myself, the snow was predictable. The cold was predictable. I could count on a warm bath or a doughy cinnamon bun.

Now, in the comfort of a house with good heating and with a husband I love enough, there is more uncertainty than the facts of my life add up to. I did become a mother, a dancer and a writer. So many questions got answered about how it would all turn out. But here, now with Zoom and a wardrobe of masks, I suddenly do not know how it will turn out. Perhaps if there was snow outside, I would be reassured that Spring would come and light and sunshine would prevail.