That Biting Cold
by
Jeff Stimpson
The forecast: teens, teens, wind, snow, teens,
sleet, teens. Ice on the sidewalks. Ankle-high mounds of snow,
rock-hard and awaiting a new storm of reinforcements. Jill went
about a week ago, started raving at The Weather Channel and
abandoned her silk underwear on principle alone. "I'm having my own
cold snap," she said.
I never knew about silk underwear until Jill.
Growing up, I had the firemen's checkered weave long-johns,
off-white even before I wore them uninterrupted from Thanksgiving
until Easter. But for the holidays one year recently Jill gave me a
pair of silk long-johns from Eddie Bauer. Soon I got tops. Then more
of each. They're airy, yet they keep me so warm I think they should
be issued to astronauts. The oldest of them is also turning to
threads, and beginning, I think, to smell. Maybe if I wash them the
cold will leave.
I'm near a snap, too, even though I grew up in
winters like this, in Maine. I used to take a 45-minute walk to
school, along with a friend, a habit we sort of both fell into one
September and, despite our both being on the college-prep track in
high school, never dumped when the snow flew. Junior year, I recall,
was the deepest cold: below zero, double mittens, my breath making
frost on the fur of my parka. That was an "open winter," meaning no
snow, just soil like the poles of Neptune. Lot of times we got snow,
of course. Then cold. No melting until late April.
My family seemed to treasure their long driveways.
We had a quarter-mile monster at the house where I grew up, I
remember shoveling (Maine's big winter sport, no matter what the ski
industry says) with my brother and dad and mum, cutting the banks
with my blade and seeing levels of snow that had built up like
geologic layers during a two-day N'easter. That's what we called
blizzards in Maine, "N'easters." "Wish it was two weeks ago," I
panted to my brother as we went after a drift. "Wish it was July,"
he replied. "This stuff wouldn't last 20 minutes." I looked through
the whiteout and saw my mum down by the foot of the driveway,
standing with her shovel propped like a musket under her arm,
defying the oncoming city plow to bury us again.
A few years later my dad died, and mum was on her
own with me, and she got started on her new life by getting a house
with a driveway perhaps two feet shorter than a quarter of a mile.
She did decide to get into the 19th century, however, and hired a
neighbor to plow it with his Jeep. Thing about plowed snow is, it's
compressed, and takes it's revenge at being pushed around on the
fool who tries to shovel it to a convenient side. One year we got
bombed with two feet, and after the plow my mother and I got to
work. Once she paused, leaned on her shovel/musket, and with great
clouds of gray vapor announced, "At least it's not that biting
cold!"
No mum, it was a balmy 30 below. It got into your
clothes. The snow squeaked.
It squeaks now in New York. The bad news is, we've
had a January like Maine. The good news is, I admit, we also had a
July like Maine. I'm no fan of heat waves, but walking down the
street now, my cheeks stinging, the wind slicing through my gloves
and seeping into my pullover, I try to remember what a coating of
sweat and mid-summer city grime feels like on my neck. Can't.
"It is that biting cold," says Jill. For
herself this year, Jill got a toasty pair of new boots. "My feet
feel like they're still in bed," she announced one frigid afternoon.
New Yorkers becoming fed up with their boots. Our PTA president
e-mailed to say she got so sick of lacing up her Timberlines that
she elected, on a day of single-digit wind chill, to wear open-toed
red sandals. I'm guessing that after about two blocks it was tough
to tell where the sandals ended and the toes began, as she stumbled
her way over the squeaking snow. Winter Tip One: You can tell the
quality of the tread on your boots by how soon after you step
through a snowbank you have to stamp the snow from your boots.
Winter Tip Two: Sometimes snow doesn't squeak,
must instead gets ground by tires and boots and sandals into a
brown-sugar-like, slippery meal of road salt and dirty slush. Alex
hates to be dragged through this.
Alex hates the cold in general. I look down as the
pink of his cheeks and nose trembles on red. "It's cold. it's cold!"
he announces. Sometimes I take Alex and Ned out in the cold, all
bundled up in the double-stroller, the plastic windscreen buttoned
down. I took them out in the stroller the other day in a sleet
storm, figuring 32 degrees was at least more like a planet closer to
the Sun, like maybe a moon of Saturn. The wind screen quickly iced
over; sleet dripped on their boots. Maybe I think this will fortify
them somehow for the future, maybe thinking it will help them one
day in high school. Maybe I'm trying to give them a pinker, more
vivid picture of my own youth. Maybe I just want them to appreciate
our living room, and July
Copyright 2003 Jeff Stimpson, all rights reserved
