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It’s Not Me, It’s You
I’m sorry, but really this breakup is final. You’ve been unfaithful to me for months, dallying with others while making only token teasing efforts in a vain attempt to convince me that you’re even still paying attention. You’ve been running hot and cold now for 3 months, only showing up when another is making her frankly more pleasant expressions of affection known. Life is too short for me to keep dealing with your teasing ways, so I’m moving on. As far as I’m concerned, our relationship ended at the holidays. You did not even show up for my birthday, instead cavorting with others hundreds of miles away. I know, I saw the pictures you were tagged in on Facebook, and the happy faces of the others whose lives you graced. I even saw them building a snowman with you when you had sworn we’d at least have a few exclusive days together in February. As far as I’m concerned, you walked out first, and I’m not taking you back.
Now again you tease and promise to fly in tonight, but we both know the only time you’ll spare is a few token hours of flirting and teasing before you melt away and leave me to clean up the mess. There will be no passion to it, just a perfunctory dance of half-remembered maneuvers. And your rival is daily flirting with me, bringing me flowers, songs, and energetic storm-tossed nights, while you rage and bellow in far off places. She caresses my hair and embraces me fondly while you slap my hands and burn my ears with your wild and now meaningless scoldings. She brightens my days with the sunshine of her presence, while your erratic arrivals cast a pall and leave behind salty trails of tears on my paths.
Winter, you inconstant and faithless dancer, we are through. Not once this year have you blanketed me deeply in your icy embrace. Not once have you let me slide across your rolling hills. You have instead bestowed your gifts on others undeserving while I kept a candle burning, awaiting your arrival. And while you might still threaten, I know you are nothing but bluster at this point. I have moved on to Spring.
Published in Humor
A frozen paean to a frozen time.
She is still flirting in Montana!
This is top tier stuff! Hilarious – and yet – poetic.
Didn’t know whether to laugh or cry – so I’m going for both :)
Just out of curiosity, where are you located? You do know you have just doomed you and your neighbors to one of those late March early April 30 inch snowfalls … Right?
Central Ohio.
Oh yeah. You’re doomed. I’m in eastern NJ. It might miss me!
We’re going to get it in the neck, and it’s all going to be Skippy’s fault.
Blast!! I thought this was going to be something else.
I keep thinking about RL Stevenson’s “The Wind” all day today.
“I saw you toss the kite on high/ and blow the birds about the sky./ …. O Wind! a-blowing all day long / O Wind! that sings so loud a song.”
We had a great winter and I got to revel in feet of snow and powder days and snowmen and cocoa… and now it is Spring! Spring! Spring!!!!!!
Brilliant! Just when you had me wondering if I should tell your wife.
We’ve had snow the last few months but it just doesn’t feel like a proper Minnesota winter without a couple of awful blizzards. It’s been years since I’ve woken up to find this out the front door.
My father is from Duluth, and he remembers a few winters where the water pipes, already buried rather deep, froze solid anyway. In order to thaw them, his father used an electric welder to run current through them – it worked too!
-40 with the wind chill in Horse Lake yesterday. Spring can come as soon as it likes.
I delivered a paper in north central Kansas, which was from a town 70 miles away, for six years as a boy. The only time in those six years the paper didn’t make it to town was because of a blizzard in late March. The old men who sat at the post office every day would razz the post master when the mail wouldn’t make it to town with, ‘but I got my paper today’. Those last gasp storms can sometimes be brutal.
What do you do when you have this much snow? I couldn’t even begin to think about how to dig out. Was it just drifted against the house? Or was it that deep on the flat?
I would close the door. I can go out tomorrow.
Hey, you can have my friend…he’s been living on my property for 3 months and won’t leave when I ask. I sicced the Groundhog on him, but he just laughed.
The drift in front of the garage door was only knee deep, so my wife and I went out that way and started shoveling off the porch. Here are the before-and-after pictures from the outside.
Four years ago, my daughter’s first year driving to a school 30 miles away, we had a terrible winter. There were both a number of snow days off school and a number of 2+ hour commutes when they didn’t cancel classes. We haven’t missed more than a day per winter since. If we can just keep these warm, mild winters 2 more years, Ava can graduate and my husband and I can snowbird!
Last summer I bought a lawn tractor with snow thrower attachment because last winter we had a couple of 3′ snowfalls. This year…not even 1/3 ” of snow. The investment worked.
In Everett, Washington, we had snow last Friday. It didn’t stick on the streets, and was all gone by the time I left for home. We still had snow on the ground in our neighborhood through Saturday.
In 1973, the last year I was in Minnesota, we had snow flurries in June.
I’ll bet the break-up is temporary. You two will be back together again before you know it.
These photos highlight one of the benefits of living just north of Tucson. Just waiting for the ice jam to break-up on the Rillito River that runs through Tucson. The seasons are overrated.
I know this is satire, but the language was genuinely heartbreaking, Skip. A testament to your writing — and, admittedly, evidence that I’ve lost my Northeastern cred when it comes to seasons — fully a Southwestern boy again who only knows hot and hotter.
My dad tells the story of staying with a college roommate in rural Montana when it got so cold their propane tank lost pressure. The roommate’s father told everyone to stay inside and built a small fire near the tank to warm the propane and boost the tank pressure.
Your Winter has been hanging out in my neighborhood. I’ve called the police several times due to unwanted stalking, but Winter seems unfazed and keeps returning. (Seriously, we’ve had more snow this winter than practically any since I’ve lived here.)
I look forward to a Spring Fling with a warmer, sunnier personality. Those icy curves just don’t do it for me. Spring usually brings me blue skies and flowers instead of dangerous road conditions and occasional power outages. Much more to my taste.
I was stuck down in the DC area the past two winters. Other than a truly historic storm last year there was not much snow. I was so glad to get back to N.E. Ohio last spring and was looking forward to a “real”winter. My feeling is that if it’s going to be gray and gloomy out it ought to at least be interesting. This year, Pffflllttt.
My kids have asked me to point out that this little missive was a riff on us all joking on the drive into school this morning. They have specifically asked that credit be given them, along with a share of any royalties.
Great post! This really is the way I feel, not sure if you were just joking. I love winter, and I didn’t get nearly enough cross-country skiing in this year.
I live in the mountains. I grew up here and was lucky enough to return.
And here’s what steams my clams: people who come to live here, and then act like a snowstorm is the equivalent of an inland tsunami.
Schools, and even businesses, now close at the first snowflake–especially since local newscasters, all of whom musta grown up in California or Florida, talk like snow is just the scariest, baddest thing ever. (And we live in a ski-resort area! )
Shut UP!
Last winter was kind of a dud, like this one–but before that, we had two glorious winters where there were about 4 feet of snow down for months, and we didn’t really see the ground till June.
Now, THA’S what I’m TALKIN’ about!
Dear Winter I will miss you!
Sunrise this morning at Toad Hall (don’t let the fresh snow fool you, baby, that’s Spring!):