I Am Not a Big Fan of Winter

It was five degrees Fahrenheit a few mornings ago when I started work. We haven’t gotten any snowfall yet that has led to an accumulation, but we have gotten some cold days and nights of late. I must admit that I am not a big fan of winter or things associated with winter aside from drinking hot chocolate, watching the Olympic Winter Games, and playing/watching ice hockey. Cuddle/make-out time in front of a fire in the fireplace or next to the Christmas tree is admittedly nice. But I am decidedly one of the “Boys of Summer.”

Playing in the snow was fun as a kid, but I grew up on the North Carolina coast. Snow was a rarity for me. It was a novelty. I didn’t go on ski trips. Winters in coastal NC can be blustery and cold. You can get some miserable weather. But winter there isn’t one long, grey, dreary blur of ice and snow. And it is mercifully brief. Not so much here in the Midwest.

Don’t get me wrong. Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, where my work-related travels take me the vast majority of the time, can be strikingly beautiful under a blanket of frosty white. I do periodically enjoy being outdoors in the winter, even if it is shoveling snow out of the driveway and off of the sidewalk. And I seem to better cope with the inevitability of winter than I did when I was younger and routinely dreamed of moving to the Florida Keys or another tropical paradise to avoid even North Carolina’s relatively mild winters. But the duration of winter and the seemingly never-ending, bone-chilling cold of the Midwest wears on me at times and I occasionally find myself dreaming of “Boat Drinks” in a coastal town. Sometimes it is a winter wonderland here and sometimes it is the icy desolation of the fictional planet Hoth or the very real Alaskan tundra.

It certainly doesn’t help that I have to get out in the weather when the weather is brutal. Waiting outside to get inside the stores at my stops. Performing pre-trip and post-trip inspections of my truck and the trailers that I haul. Fueling trucks and reefers. Clearing ice from the windshield and windows. Waiting for the car or my truck to warm up inside. I suppose that it is similar to working outside in the Southern California desert during the summer. You can get irritable or even angry in the morning when faced with the certainty that the sun is going to be kicking your ass for ten to twelve hours. But I would rather be hot than cold. And I have experienced some serious cold since I moved here.

I moved to the Midwest for personal reasons and rural Northern Illinois has its charms. I hated that a career in my chosen field was not as feasible in such a setting as it was in the Triangle region of North Carolina, Chicago, or even the not-too-distant Quad Cities. Frankly, I think that my decision to train to be a truck driver worked out well for me considering that the pandemic made me “essential.” Granted, I was eventually benched for almost four months by a combination of COVID-19 and a pulmonary embolism. But I hate to think how the pandemic would have affected me financially as a fitness/sport performance professional. With all that being said, I must admit that I had a private chuckle the other morning when I considered that a younger me would have insisted that a person only moves to such a climate if they are fleeing bad, painful memories or trouble. Let’s just say that if I someday move to Alaska or Canada, you shouldn’t come looking for me. You DEFINITELY don’t want a piece of me. You better leave that to the professionals of the Division of Alaska State Troopers or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. 😉

It is difficult for me not to foresee myself someday moving back to a warmer coastal community. But I also know all too well not to rule out me taking another road in my life. In the meantime, I hope to enjoy the aspects of winter that I can (like seeing Ice Castles in Lake Geneva [https://icecastles.com/]) and holding out until warmer weather arrives.