Let's Play Pretend

Have you seen this?  This was and will be the actual weather in Austin for last weekend and this week.  High of 38?!?  That is crazy talk and I love it!  High of 56 on Thanksgiving?  That means the oven can be on all day and no one is sweating and wearing shorts.  That is happiness, pure and simple happiness.

Austin, I am not mocking you because I have lived here long enough to go "BRRRR" when faced with anything below 50.  My first winter here I ran around without a coat on because I thought it was so warm and took on an ice storm like it was nothing. The hotel I worked at had me drive two ladies down the tollroad in Dallas through said ice storm to their meeting.  Hotel insurance wouldn't cover their hotel vans going out, but it was perfectly fine for the Buffalo girl to take guests out in her crappy car.  They gave me a giant cookie when I got back and I thought it a perfectly reasonable exchange.   I will admit that I do giggle a little at how Texas plays winter.  The weather people with their somber voices and dramatic music and lead-ins of "Winter 2013".  Protect your plants!  Go wrap your pipes!  Bring the dogs in!  Please, dogs in my neighborhood are treated as good if not better than the kids, so no worries there.  There is the poor young newscaster right out of college doing the live reports bundled up in a puffy, down,  3/4 length coat, a Russian fur hat and scarf up under her nose.  The temperature?  50.  Then the weather man with his dire intonations of possible freezing precipitation, showing us video of snow in counties so far west and north, I think they must be in New Mexico.  My poor Texas children go to bed with visions of snowflakes dancing in their head.  The boy I can't pull out of bed in the morning is running down the stairs at 6:30am on a day off to see if it snowed.

I have seen some great things this week as we all hunker down and play winter.  Kids at school are either dressed to summit Everest or are wearing shorts and pretending they are not cold even as their legs turns pink.  The number of trees decorated along 360 has increased as cooler weather leads us into thinking Christmas. The environmentalist in me cringes with these adorned trees, but the bored commuter in me loves them.

not the best shot, but the only one where I was stuck in traffic.

Another fun thing I saw on my commute this week was a man not only selling firewood on the side of the road but chopping it as well.  Go Paul Bunyan! Is that great marketing or what?!?  We don't have an actual wood burning fireplace and I still wanted to stop and buy logs. (and no, it was not a shirtless young man chopping. He was old and layered up like he was wearing every shirt he owned)

The stores already crowded with the pre-Thanksgiving rush are now inundated with those afraid of being iced in without enough bread or milk or God help us, Deep Eddy Pink Grapefruit vodka.  We can do without a lot for a few days but not that vodka.

I know that there are many of you who are tired of the cold weather already (CG), but I say keep it coming!  We had the most relaxing weekend ever last weekend because we were hunkered down playing winter.  We didn't go anywhere, we didn't do much, we napped, we played some board games and even the kids were content.  The boy laughed so hard playing Apples to Apples that he turned red and couldn't breathe and I soaked up his exuberance and joy.   The oven and stove were on all day and it was still pleasant in the house.  A weekend of comfy pants and sweatshirts, of low expectations and contentment.  I had that rested Thanksgiving feeling a full five days before Thanksgiving!

When my kids tell me they are cold, I absolutely love to tell them "put a sweater on."  My mother must have intoned this ten times a day for 20 years between October and April each year and it gives me great happiness to hear her words come out of my mouth.  Layer up.  Dress for the weather.  Even Bill has been spotted dressing for the weather.  

the message makes me sigh, but the hoodie makes me smile.

I love this playing winter. I say playing because it is cold but we don't have to shovel our way out of the house or change the tires on our cars for snow.  We are not snowed in, iced in or otherwise truly inconvenienced.  We can still get to the store, the bank and our jobs.  I like to wear sweaters to work and not sweat.  I like the way a hot cup of coffee feels in hands that are actually a little cold.  I like that the kids and dogs all want to sit on the same couch and as close to each other as possible.  I do hope it snows at some point this year.  We have been years without snow and it is time for a light dusting to shut down the city.  My kids need to play outside and build a dirty snowman and lay down some snow angels and beam each other with snowballs.  Heck, forget the kids, I need to do that! We could play outside until our noses run and turn red and our wet hands in our cheap gloves go numb and tingle.  We'll stomp the snow off of our feet as we make it inside and gladly hold a cup of something steaming hot in our hands.  We'll sit on the couch together and watch the news to see if there will be more snow and watch the video footage where the camera sets up at the bottom of a hill and watches cars slide down it and take bets on whether they will slide, stop or stop and slide.  We will play games and read books and watch too much TV and be lazy.

Really, the only thing missing from this current cold spell is that silence that comes from a snowfall at night.  The world becomes muffled under a soft blanket of white and you can hear everything around you and nothing at all at the same time.  It is a quiet not heard in our days of rushing and beeping and buzzing and frenzied activities and one I think would do us all a world of good.    We will slow the world down for a day and savor it because it is fleeting.  It will be here and gone and we will be back to tank tops and flip flops in an eye blink.  So don't hate it Austin, embrace it!