This is the strangest time of the year. The fountain on Library Mall has been turned off. The trees have already lost their leaves. But it is easy to ignore these signs of the coming winter.
After all, the weather is not too bad yet, and the lakes have not frozen over. If you want to, you can even pretend that it's springtime, the long Wisconsin winter somehow slipped by us and we've skipped from November to April.
Who likes winter anyway? It's cold and wet and dark by 5 p.m. Animals obviously hate it: Everything from monarch butterflies to geese migrate south for winter. Usually I agree with them. Snow is nice the first few times you see it, but the novelty wears off pretty quickly while the snow sticks around long after everyone is sick of it.
After I moved from Southern California to Northern Wisconsin, I wore shorts for three straight years. At first I was protesting the move, but by the end of it I realized that I was really just too lazy to buy pants. My family has videos of me sledding, shoveling the walk and getting in a snowball fight'all in shorts. I eventually started wearing pants, but I never lost my distaste for the longest season of the year.
This year is different though, no longer do I look at the falling thermometer with fear and dread. This year I am looking forward
to six months of subzero temperatures. I
have come to recognize that even winter has its advantages.
Hopefully, once it gets a little colder, my neighbors will be forced to shut their windows as they play Phish every single night. I hate jam bands. My God, I hate jam bands. They are as common as substandard student housing and as popular as beer on a Tuesday, but I just can't stand them.
Maybe I don't smoke enough pot, but when I hear a 73-minute wandering canoodle about a piece of toast, I have to suppress the urge to smash my face into a brick. Nothing would please me more than to look up and see majestic flocks of jam bands flying south for the winter in V formation. Of course, they would have to be up high enough so that you couldn't hear them from the ground.
Winter has more to offer than just an absence of jam bands (as if that was not enough). Holidays, ice skating, hot buttered rum, that month-long break from school'the list goes on and on. In the end, all of these advantages, however nice, don't really compare. The important thing is that people can't play guitar on their front porch if it is covered in ice.
With that in mind, I have changed my view of the season I once hated. No longer do I see winter as six months of bleak grayness, without warmth or light or life. I see winter as six months without having to listen to Phish. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.
