Jerry Seinfeld once said the key to life is finding enjoyable ways to waste time. The idea is rather simple. If you enjoy making and drinking espresso, then buy all of things to help you spend an inordinate amount of time in that pursuit. Buy the fancy espresso machine. Buy the small batch beans from Columbia, the ones that are roasted on nets that the local women make out of hemp. Buy the little agitator thing and the swirly thing and the tamper thing, the one that you ordered custom from a woodworker who carves and sands his handles from deep inside an Oregon forest. Spend the money and the time doing this thing you love, because if you can’t waste time doing this, when why bother living? It’s a cute concept, but I have no idea what he’s talking about.
In fact, I spend most of my time wondering about, worrying about, thinking about, obsessing about, and generally living and dying with one not so simple thing: The Weather. For instance, barely four weeks ago I was irritated at our winter. It wasn’t winter at all, not really. It wasn’t cold and it wasn’t snowy and the theory to which I subscribe says that if it’s going to be winter then it might as well act like winter. I would drive around the lake, ornery about the dead grass and the open water and the construction that had, up until then, progressed uninterrupted by the season, as if it weren’t January. Then it all changed. The snow fell and piled. The temperature plummeted. My driveway became slick. I fell on a tarp that I had laid on a trailer that had been covered in snow. My windows iced up and my diesel tractor wouldn’t start. Even so, I shoveled with initial joy, because this was the winter I liked.
After a few weeks of this winter, I decided that I didn’t like it. Not at all. It’s not that I want to resign myself to an inane life with that fixed smile of the southerner (to borrow from Emerson), but the forecast showed warmth and and some sun and that’s what I was after now. Enough of the winter, enough of that white and that cold and the frozen this and slippery that, I was ready for whatever was next. The warmth arrived and the sun did its work and my driveway was cleared and my lawn returned and it was time to cut back the hydrangeas and prune the apple trees. Inside of 30 days I was longing for winter and then over it, and now I wish only to see the snow melt and the ice, too, and hope that spring will be early.
This is what it’s like to be a true northerner. If you cannot simultaneously romanticize the winter and then immediately hate it, are you even from the Midwest?