Snow

Yes ladies and gentlemen this is my sorry excuse for a merry Christmas post. BTW MERRY CHRISTMAS everybody GOD BLESS US EVERYONE!!!

This is a post I wrote about two weeks ago but got lost in the editing stages (hey my wife was an English major) so now for your edification I’ll be posting it.

Snow

It comes and it goes, and in a strange way it brings warmth and light to an otherwise cold and dark winter. You all living there in Texas probably don’t know what I mean by that since your winters, if you can call them that, are very mild. But here where winter spans a good four months of the year and some time stretches on to take up most of the rest of it snow is one of the few things that makes winter worth bearing.

The fall months are the absolute most boring part of the year. The cold that is wet, and because of that all the more biting, is a very powerful reminder of where you’re living after spending summer sweltering away under a sun that is not as hot as it should be to make you sweet like you have been. The shock will force you to stay inside as much as possible and only let you out when you really need to. The ground is wet from  the rain that has turned your once green football (for those of you in the US read soccer) field to mud, so you can’t even go out to for a fulfilling form of exercise. During this time of mixed cold and warmth is when your body is the weakest, or at least not at its strongest, and so you are left open to at the least annoying and at the worst debilitating sicknesses. All the while you struggle to find the right clothes to wear, the perfect mix between warmth and comfort, one day you wear your winter boots and wool coat and find out that it’s the warmest day of the month, you sweet it out, and fell like a fool. The next day determined not to make the same mistake you wear a nice light jacket and a smart pair of dress shoes, you come home with cold feet and a sore throat that leaves you talking in a strained whisper. The leaves fall off the trees like you knew they would and in the place of their warm greens and yellows is left hard cold browns and grays. And all the while there’s the thought that “this is just the beginning, it will get much worse before it gets any better.

Then the month of December rolls around and you say “now it’s really winter, here comes the snow”, Pack up the cleats and swimming trunks make way for the hats, scarves, and down jackets. A week goes by and the weather stays the same, one day warm the next slightly colder. It drops below freezing and still no snow. The weather forecast said it snowed last night but by the time you got up it was gone, melted by the barely above freezing temperatures. You say to your self “here goes the first global warming winter in Ukraine, no white Christmas, and Happy Honokaa, sore throat.”

You wake up next Thursday morning and the windows are all fogged up, just like they always are, you don’t bother to look out anymore. Without even going down for coffee you start in on your work (please note this is a very rare occasion) you have to send three emails off before you eat breakfast. Half way through your last message your loving wife comes in and says: “Honey, it’s snowing outside.” You grunt and say “yeah right.” But secretly deep down in side you hope that it’s true, the promised end to the gray and the mud in spite of this you still don’t look, to busy.

You don’t look until around 10:00 about three hours latter when you step out side your door to find your backyard covered in a thin sparse clothing of white stuff. Not exactly sledding material you think but it’s a good break from what it was yesterday. This week is starting to look better at least the city is anyways. After a long day out in the cold you get on the bus to go home, it’s still snowing. “Merry Christmas” you say to yourself, your throat feels fine.

Ps. As a bit of an update we got about 10 inches of snow over the past week and it got down to about 6 degrees Fahrenheit, but now sense the it has gone above freezing. You know what that mean right, wet water every where, not that you would want to drink any. it’s also raining so that  will make the now melt faster, which is good in theory but it could mean that I we (Michelle and I) won’t have a white Christmas, sniff sniff.

Pss. I also got Skype just recently so you can call me there my name is marshal.j.nash so give me a call or something see ya and have a happy new year to.