I woke up this morning to the first snowfall of the year, blowing sideways in the wind. I looked at my phone–I wish this wasn’t my habit when I first wake up, but it is. According to my phone, it wasn’t snowing. Funny thing about living in the mountains–maybe it wasn’t snowing in town, on the other side of the ridge, but it was snowing in my yard. Rintrah sat on the bed, watching. He doesn’t look at a phone so much, except ruefully, wondering why I’m paying attention to it instead of him.
Sometimes in the morning, he sits on the bed and stares towards the long gravel driveway, looking for deer. This time he just watched the snow fall.
I decided that snow meant I could stay in bed an hour longer than usual, and for some reason Rintrah forgave me. Probably belly rubs. Then I got dressed, put on hat and gloves, put a harness on the boy, and went out into the wind and weather to kick leaves for Rintrah to chase
Winter was always my favorite season–I use the past tense because I’ve got a newfound obsession with autumn, but I’ve always loved winter. Where I grew up, with a solid four-season year, winter is the season that disrupts the status quo. Winter meant the occasional blizzard, the occasional snow day home from school.
I took any excuse possible to stay home from school, especially in elementary school and middle school, where I was relentlessly bullied and constantly anxious, before I found other weirdos–frankly, before I found weirdos who knew how to fight. It’s not so much violence itself that solves problems as the capacity to perform it.
Winter is the season that gives everyone excuses. It’s no coincidence that everyone with white-collar jobs just kind of collectively gives up trying for a month or so at the start of winter. It’s a strange sort of labor action, taken by the slightly more privileged in our society. It’s a good action, though. I wish more folks could take it. We should all collectively work a lot less hard right now.
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