Winter Doldrums - Almost
Sometimes just knowing that something is coming is all it takes.
Winter in New Jersey is not the worst thing in the world. There are plenty of other locations where I would not move to for the length of winter and the shortness of the days. Northern Canada is out, Alaska is out, as well as Siberia, Cape of Good Hope, Cape Horn, any of the Aleutian Islands... I am not a lover of winter.
Still, it is not all sunshine and roses here, either. It is lovely in the summer - the days are long, about 15 hours long, and the sun sets with great slowness and there are the long twilights. In that way, being a little more north might be nice... say, a 17 hour day... I could go to Maine or southern Canada and have that. But conversely the winters are only 9 hours of daylight - here - and so 18:00 feels much the same as midnight. I find it harder to stay awake to bedtime, let alone any later hour. And getting up is a misery when it is so deeply dark outside. But it is what it is. At least they make full-spectrum lighting now. With the right lights in the house, it won't matter that night falls at the heinous hour of 16:30.
I don't care for the bitter cold, either. It is terribly uncomfortable to be out on the highway at 02:30 because some idiot that could not bother to slow down in the snow crashed his or her vehicle. It is the kind of cold that seeps into your bones and no matter how much you drink tea and shiver under the covers it will not easily leave. And when it gets windy there is no warming up! And then there are the times we have been out in many inches of snow in the freezing cold wee hours. Yuck.
Well, I complain about it but the fact is I wouldn't live somewhere without four separate and distinct seasons. So there it is. Without the darkness and starkness of winter, I would not have the sultry warmth of summer, the burst of pastels of spring and the stunning fiery colours of that most gorgeous of seasons, autumn. And I would not trade autumn for the world!
Welcome, Winter!
Winter in New Jersey is not the worst thing in the world. There are plenty of other locations where I would not move to for the length of winter and the shortness of the days. Northern Canada is out, Alaska is out, as well as Siberia, Cape of Good Hope, Cape Horn, any of the Aleutian Islands... I am not a lover of winter.
Still, it is not all sunshine and roses here, either. It is lovely in the summer - the days are long, about 15 hours long, and the sun sets with great slowness and there are the long twilights. In that way, being a little more north might be nice... say, a 17 hour day... I could go to Maine or southern Canada and have that. But conversely the winters are only 9 hours of daylight - here - and so 18:00 feels much the same as midnight. I find it harder to stay awake to bedtime, let alone any later hour. And getting up is a misery when it is so deeply dark outside. But it is what it is. At least they make full-spectrum lighting now. With the right lights in the house, it won't matter that night falls at the heinous hour of 16:30.I don't care for the bitter cold, either. It is terribly uncomfortable to be out on the highway at 02:30 because some idiot that could not bother to slow down in the snow crashed his or her vehicle. It is the kind of cold that seeps into your bones and no matter how much you drink tea and shiver under the covers it will not easily leave. And when it gets windy there is no warming up! And then there are the times we have been out in many inches of snow in the freezing cold wee hours. Yuck.
Well, I complain about it but the fact is I wouldn't live somewhere without four separate and distinct seasons. So there it is. Without the darkness and starkness of winter, I would not have the sultry warmth of summer, the burst of pastels of spring and the stunning fiery colours of that most gorgeous of seasons, autumn. And I would not trade autumn for the world!
Welcome, Winter!
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