This was an email message I sent to my mother
Mon 10/27/97 2:42 PM
Mom,
When the cold weather shows up and the snow starts to fall, people often ask me why I live here, and why I like winter so much, since I grew up in a warm part of the country.
I tell them that, growing up in Georgia, I learned about winter from movies and television and books and paintings and photographs and songs, but that cold weather and significant snow was no more real to me than the jungles Tarzan called home or the deserts camels traversed. I'd seen kids bundled up and sledding, skiers flying down mountainsides, horse drawn sleighs, the poor man getting covered by snow falling off the roof, but always in the movies, never in person.
To me, this winter is as exotic and foreign as a tropical paradise. More so, actually, since I was familiar with Florida. To actually see a blanket of snow across a corn field, a pure brilliant white going on forever; to see a lake or river covered with ice so thick that dogs walk across it and snow covers it so thoroughly that only the flatness and lack of features sets it off from the surrounding fields; to feel the sting of the wind against my face when it is -10 degrees, the thin purity of the air, the impossibly deep blue of the sky; these are still, going into my tenth winter, fascinating and wonderful things that no native could ever know. OK, probably few transplants would agree, either.
This past week I bought Steinbeck's Travels with Charley as part of my program to catch up on all the cultural stuff I've missed. Today at lunch I ran across this passage:
Long ago at Easter I had a looking-egg. Peering in a little porthole at the end, I saw a lovely little farm, a kind of dream farm, and on the farmhouse chimney a stork sitting on a nest. I regarded this as a fairy-tale farm as surely imagined as gnomes sitting under toadstools. And then in Denmark I saw that farm or its brother, and it was true, just as it had been in the looking-egg. And in Salinas, California, where I grew up, although we had some frost the climate was cool and foggy. When we saw colored pictures of a Vermont autumn forest it was another fairy thing and we frankly didn't believe it. In school we memorized '"Snowbound" and little poems about Old Jack Frost and his paintbrush, but the only thing Jack Frost did for us was put a thin skin of ice on the watering trough, and that rarely. To find not only that this bedlam of color was true but that the pictures were pale and inaccurate translations, was to me startling.
He is talking about fall colors, and I am talking about snow and ice and cold, but I think the feeling is very similar.
love, craig