A Dream in Winter

Winter here has been less dramatic than in other parts of the country, but it has still bludgeoned and humbled us. Now in our third month of below-average temperatures, we turn up our collars, we pull on our gloves, we take our own warm bodies, all that we have, onto ice-slicked sidewalks, along frost-heaved roads. We push ourselves through the teens, the twenties, if we're lucky the thirties.

I know this sounds wimpy to you denizens of the north, to residents of Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas — but I want out of winter.

The thing is, persistent cold steels the soul, locks it up tight till springtime. Every year I try to play along. I walk through it and I read and write through it. I cook through it. I work through it. Most of all, though, I dream through it — dream of a sunny deck, the smell of highly chlorinated water on a summer day, a hammock beneath the trees as green leaves wag overhead.