When I declare, in the middle of summer "Yeah, I'm pretty much a true Northerner - summer doesn't do it for me," I can clear a room pretty fast. I've lived all over the world and experienced life in places where one season was it. Sure, when I lived in Phoenix it wasn't always one-hundred-and-sixteen degrees Farenheit, sometimes it went down to ninety. Or eighty-three.
And I know people who wouldn't trade life in San Diego or wherever for a place with real seasons but that's just not me and never will be.
You won't catch me one day writing a blog post for aronsolomon dot com from Galveston Beach, fine place that I'm sure it is.
Each season to me represents what it literally is: a rebirth. At great risk of sounding excessively philosophical, we only get a certain number of springs and falls and winters and, yeah, even summers. So, what we make of each season, how we process it and create our reality within it is a remarkably special thing.
But, still, to be winter's groupie smack dab in the middle of summer is akin to cheering for the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium, which I'm throwing caution to the warm wind and doing here. In no particular order, I'm going to list some cool (pun intended) reasons why winter rocks harder than Ted Nugent's "Intensities in Ten Cities":
- skating outdoors
- colourful scarves
- wool baseball hats with ear flaps and Gore-Tex linings
- pho (love it year round, but nothing warms like pho with a few squeezes of sriracha sauce)
- ice hockey
- winter jackets and fleece-y tops
- wearing two pairs of socks sometimes, just for the heck of it
- anything maple-flavoured
- seeing your breath after a workout
- the coziness of fireplaces
- boots
Perhaps part of winter's allure is illusory and allusory, a season born from stories of comfort against the cold just as much as Saabs are born from jets.
But my love for seasons extend well beyond winter. Some of my best memories as a kid were from playing that late fall football or the first spring baseball games. It was the smell of whatever was cooking at our country house or how the newly-cold weather marked another hockey and basketball season.
And, as an adult who travels so much, the anomaly of the seasons captivates me. Santiago, Chile during North American summer is amazing. Twelve hours on a plane and it's winter. Remarkable. Just as the seasons always have been to me.
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