Mid-January

At some point, the snow becomes a sedative. There's so much of it, and it's just there, and it keeps falling, piling, drifting. Beautiful, true, but superficial, perhaps, in the way that beauty can be. I used to feel sorry for the weather reporters in Arizona; they had to say the same words every day with the same cheerful smiles. Sunny and hot, sunny and warm, sunny and steamy... As far as forecasts go, winter here is comparable to summer there. Cold with snow flurries, arctic cold with snow showers, cold and heavy lake effect, cold and bands of snow, cold with an oscillating band of heavy snow. The sameness is what eventually becomes tiresome -- when a crow or a cardinal flies through the tree branches on a snowy morning, it's such a shock to the system I almost gasp. And when the sun comes out... even if only for ten minutes... feels like nearly a miracle.