Opening Letters

Weary of Winter

enduring Wisconsin weather requires an attitude adjustment

Tom Giffey |

I think winter may finally be getting to me.

That’s a striking statement for several reasons. First, the Wisconsin winter has barely begun. When I started complaining about winter, it was early December and – according to the calendar – winter hadn’t even officially begun. (I was tempted to bury the offending calendar in a snowbank, but that would mean stepping into the cold unnecessarily.)

The second reason that’s a striking statement is I’m a born-and-bred Wisconsinite. My roots go back more than five generations to hardy German and Irish settlers who survived Wisconsin winters without heated automobiles or indoor plumbing or Gore-Tex-coated, fleece-lined parkas. Culturally and genetically, I’m inclined to regard Jack Frost with indifference. I never particularly loved winter, but I never loathed it, either.

For most of my 37 years as a Wisconsinite, I rolled with the meteorological punches. The extremes of our climate – from blazing, soupy Augusts to frozen, snowy Februarys – are all I’ve ever known, so I never thought to complain much about them. And, if anything, I preferred the depths of winter to the dog days of summer, reasoning that while you can always add another layer of clothing when the mercury drops you can’t always remove one when it soars.

I love this place and I can’t imagine leaving it, so somehow I’ve got to make peace with winter.

For the most part, I could never figure why Midwesterners sometimes moved elsewhere to permanently avoid winter, especially when “elsewhere” meant the Sun Belt. Perhaps that’s because one of my only experiences visiting the South was a sweltering July week spent in Mississippi, where the heat index was even scarier than the “Jefferson Davis is my president” bumper stickers. More likely it’s because I can’t imagine why retirement-age folks would want to pull up their roots and relocate to Florida or Arizona after a lifetime in God’s Country. Was avoiding the cold and snow really worth living in a virtual oven thousands of miles from friends they’ve had for decades, from the communities they’ve helped build, and – most importantly – from their children and grandchildren? Was shoveling the driveway really so onerous that it’s worth missing all those school plays, basketball games, and birthdays?

These are the thoughts of a young man convinced of the rightness of his point of view – a point of view now obscured by icicles. Last winter – with its below-normal temperatures, frequent snowstorms, and false endings (remember that May blizzard?) led me to reconsider my long-held opinion. My unease with the season has only grown more acute this winter. The color-coded newspaper weather maps frequently show nothing but a band of white over the Upper Midwest, perhaps indicating that, instead of just melting, the polar ice cap had slid down the globe like a liquefying scoop of ice cream. The clincher may have come on a recent near-subzero morning when I discovered, to my chagrin, that the driver’s door of my car had frozen shut. It responded to neither reason nor force, so I was obliged to clumsily crawl into the driver’s seat from the passenger side, much to the amusement of my toddler son in the back seat. I repeated the undignified process several times before the feeble sunshine and a can of lock deicer worked their magic.  

This kind of thing is getting old, I thought.

Heck, I’m getting old, I thought.

The thought of grimly stumbling through four or five more months of snow and slush and ice, of shoveling and scraping windows, of shivering in the dark as the dog stretches to the end of his leash and squats in the snow – that thought does not appeal to me. Yet I love this place and I can’t imagine leaving it, so somehow I’ve got to make peace with winter.

As I pondered this point and (to pull back the writer’s curtain a bit) cast about for a way to wrap up this column, I realized it was too cold for epiphanies; attitudes must change gradually, like the seasons. As I shuffled from my car to the office one afternoon, I encountered a man I’d seen a few times before, a man heavily bundled against the cold and carrying his belongings in several large plastic bags. Without a greeting, he leaped into a monologue about the weather, about how the cold snap was supposed to last another five days – five days! – but that at least after December the days get a little longer. He said he lived in a tent by the river and that a bird had burrowed its way inside – like a (bleeping) rodent! – and that he has to leave the flaps unzipped during the day so they don’t freeze shut. And yet he seemed unfazed. He grew up in Duluth, he explained, and “Compared with Duluth, this is the Mediterranean.”

Winter may be getting to me, but encountering this man did, too. My wintertime complaints – the wintertime complaints most of us have – pale next to those of the marginalized and homeless. That’s not exactly an epiphany – it’s more of a matter-of-fact observation – but it’s enough to still my tongue the next time I’m tempted to complain about the winter.