A Hazy Shade of Winter

We had our first dusting of snow yesterday.

  

Most of it's gone now.  All that's left is a light sugar-frosting on the still strangely-green grass.  We're in the second-third of December and there is still green grass.  It doesn't seem to line up with the proliferation of Currier and Ives imagery that comes with the last page of the calendar.

It's hard for me to tell whether it's the age in which we live, or just the age I have reached, that makes me acutely aware of dissonance and disconnection.

I am hard-coded to love winter because, to me, it means mountains of snow, piles of blankets and the risks and rewards of a roaring fire.

The house I grew up in was a duplex with a common foyer and a staircase that swept up to the upper flat.  One of the ways we marked the changing of the seasons was the return of the boot tray and the pairs of wildly different winter boots that would wait for their owners there like cars outside a funeral home:  all lined-up and ready to go.  

It always seemed to me that the bigger you were the less of a boot you had to wear.  We kids had what used to be called over-shoes.  These were thick rubber boots that, surprisingly enough, went over your shoes.  They had what I would describe as a white woolen washer that looked like cauliflower that encircled the inside top of the boot to protect against snow getting inside and they were fastened with an adjustable strap and buckle arrangement.  They were very practical, but I always hated wearing them.  My dad and the grown-ups he ran with wore toe-rubbers: a kind of condom for the soles of their dress shoes.  The only time I saw my dad wear proper winter boots was when there was a big storm, or when he was headed out into the country.

I hated the overshoes because of the effort it took to put them on.  The boots were always the last thing to put on and once you had all the layers of clothing and sweater and coat and scarf on, the simple act of folding yourself in half to tug on the boots was daunting.  There was a whole protocol to dressing for winter both because, at that time, winter was an actual season and because nobody wanted their kid to catch a cold.

As we kids got older and harder to manage, the outerwear protocol got redacted and contracted. 

First to go was the use of that buckle and strap on the overshoes.  It was a minor act of civil disobedience, but it was a protest nonetheless and one that spread among the elementary school crowd I ran with.  In those days, it was not a crime to let your children walk to school and so you would see companies of kids coming from all directions with tiny nickle-plated buckles swinging from the rubber straps on their overshoes, each of them fighting the power.

After the boots came the coats.  

There's a line in "Ya Got Trouble" from Meredith Wilson's "The Music Man":  "The moment  your son leaves the house, does he re-buckle his knickerbockers below the knee?"  After being stuffed and crammed into our winter coats, throttled with scarves and blinded with scratchy woolen hats, once we were out the door, we un-buttoned, un-zipped and un-stuffed as best we could.  Safely out of sight, I would snatch the hat from my head and bury it in my pocket.  I have a larger than average-size head and sheathing it in a toque with a pom-pom on top was tantamount to wearing a clown nose and a "Kick Me" sign.

My nascent vanity may have caused me to rupture just about every blood vessel in my giant ears, but nobody was going to tell me what do to, especially if they didn't know I wasn't doing it.

At some point while I was in school, winter boots fell completely out of fashion and kids started wearing running shoes.  

This is where I mark the beginning of the end of winter and the start of global warming.  

When I started school, you had gym shoes.  These were shoes you kept at school and were to be worn only for gym class because the gym teacher was obsessive about his floors in a way that made him hard to take seriously. 

Most of us had canvas high-tops and they were considered a school supply and not a fashion essential.  At some point--I think it was in the early Seventies--Adidas broke through as the first brand that kids recognized and had to have.

In retrospect, you can see the now-classic wave of trend ebb  and flow.  First, only the "rich kids" had Adidas and they were a remarkable sight as in "Look, are those Adidas Richie Rich wearing?  Of course they are."  And then, "These Northstars kind of look like Adidas."  Followed by "Can you believe it?  Poor Paulie is wearing hand-me-down Adidas."

It didn't take long for the overshoes to be replaced by running shoes in the school cloak room and on the boot tray outside our front door.

When I was a kid, winter was a months-long event that you had to dress up for--like going the theatre, or getting married.  There was a definite hunkering down, a drawing closer for warmth and company because going outside was an ordeal full of harsh conditions and uncomfortable clothing.

As time has passed, as I have continued to ripen and leave my best-before-date to recede in the rear view mirror, there is less of everything.  The coats are lighter, the boots are thinner and rarely out of the closet.  There is less to winter itself and the renewal that is marked by the winter solstice and the many celebrations that are anchored to it.  For most, the holidays begin and end with sales:  they start with deep discounts on toys and end with deep discounts on holiday decorations.  It's all one big transaction:  we'll help you buy gifts for your loved ones if, when it's over, you help us by taking these decorations off our hands.

As a culture we have a fondness for stories about the traditions of the holiday season.  They connect us to an idea about family and home that, as adults, we work so hard to free ourselves from.  

This is the essential transaction of life:  we are insulated against a harsh environment by layers of protection, resist, resent, and reject that protection only to discover that colds are common because everybody gets them and they are not nearly as much fun when you have to take care of yourself.

I have an extended family:  "extended" in the same way that a rope bridge is extended across a crevasse, a canyon, or a pair of cliffs.  We are attached, but the bonds seem tenuous and the space between us vast.  There were many years--too many years--when crossing that bridge, relying on those bonds, seemed foolish, even dangerous.  Like the layers of winter coats I was so anxious to be freed from, I did what I could to release myself from those bonds, but as another year comes to an end and winter threatens, I now see a new value in sensible seasonal apparel and the worth of a good pair of overshoes.