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Day of the Horse, whatever that means
Human Rights Day
Thomas Gallaudet’s Birthday
It’s the holidays around here, dammit.
Mostly it’s my fault. Ye gods, if there’s anyone less like Ebenezer Scrooge before his party, introduce me. I’m frolicking around like a children’s Christmas special, belting out “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow” at top volume as I munch on rumballs and chug the world’s best Mexican cocoa.* I’ve even set up my room to look festive. In my case this means a two-foot tree with little trinkets around the bottom, perfect for my, uh—okay, my six large vinyl dolls.** Whom I’ve also dressed up.
I make an awful cynic at this time of year, don’t I?
Anyway, one of the best things about being back here is the cold. Because god damn, it’s cold. This is how winter should be.
Oregon does not do winter well. Oregon has cold, yes, but it’s wimpy cold, and it never gets to the below freezing levels that you find here in Salt Lake. Here it’s cold enough to get you some decent snow, snow that flurries and flies in your face and freezes on the road until you can’t get anywhere unless you want to slide down the mountain shrieking blue murder. When it really gets going, you’ll go out to shovel the driveway, and by the time you reach the end the beginning will need redoing, and after a few tries of this you give up and call your own snow day and go back to bed.
And the best thing about the cold around here is the dryness.
In Eugene, there’s water in the air, lots of it. It absorbs the cold into itself, forming big damp clots of atmosphere that wriggle under your sweater and cling to your skin like a clammy blanket. You get this unpleasant suspicion that the cold is actually sticking to you, and you feel like you have to slog through it to get where you’re going. It’s coast cold.
Here, it’s mountain cold, and that means the air, even when full of snowflakes, is dry. It crackles when you move, and you get the impression that if you moved just a little more quickly, there would be a great sound of shattering and the air would go crashing down around you in little shards. I used to think that the term ‘cold snap’ was coined because you feel like you could snap the cold in half like an icicle. It’s the sort of air that you take a deep breath of to smell the snow, and then as you let it out blood comes gushing from your nose. It conveniently stays outside of your sweater, but expose an inch of flesh and that air will freeze the goosebumps off. That’s the kind of cold I like.
And it makes me absurdly happy, too. I don’t know why. It could be the time of year. It could be some sort of reverse-SAD. Or I’m just a nostalgic sucker who likes to be where she grew up. But whatever the reason, it’s a good feeling.
*Or I will chug it, once more milk gets here.
**Look, I don’t know how it happened either. I got a Molly doll from American Girl when I was eight, and then I blacked out and woke up some eight years later with six of ’em from various companies, and a metric ton of clothes and accessories. I still set them up, in the two square meters of my room they have appropriated, every month, and I talk to them like they’re real people.*** Now this is psychotic, I realize, but it’s the harmless kind, so who cares? I am proud to say that, through a design-your-own-doll program long since economically dead and buried, I am now one of the few amateur authors in the world to have an 18-inch, custom-made vinyl doll of one of her own characters.
***True story: I once bought one of them a pair of glasses because one of her eyes is a little droopy and crossed.
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