Finally, our horrible, freezing, miserable, awful winter has broken and spring finally seems to be bursting through the cracks! (However, until June, as a Michigander, I respect and realize that it may still snow and/or drop 20 degrees overnight with no provocation.) I cannot remember a winter as harsh and simply dreadful as the one that just passed. There was talk that Michigan had been the worst hit in the country. In Detroit, we broke the snow record from 1881 with 94.8″. NINETY FOUR POINT EIGHT INCHES. That is less that 2 inches shy of EIGHT FEET OF SNOW. That is ridiculous. Simply ridiculous! I don’t know if it was just chance or climate change or God’s way of saying He was unhappy about something, but if next winter is a repeat… I don’t know. I don’t have an answer to that; if next winter has weather that bad again I’m not sure I will be able to make it, graduation or not.
So, since every state was hit by this horrible winter, and hopefully rejoicing in a promising spring, I thought I would make a list about things this winter has done to me. From the songs I don’t think I can ever enjoy again to the camaraderie it created with my neighbors to the scholastic wonder if my GPA could just take the hit, here is my list:
- Made me hate snow. A biggie for me. When my city is blanketed in snow and the trees all look like pieces of art, it was one of the most beautiful sites in the world. It WAS. If a snowflake doesn’t fall until 2016, I will be just fine.
- It was so damn cold. Honest to God, moving between buildings on campus meant covering every square inch of exposable skin, of perpetually seeing your breath, bitter, angry wind blowing in your face and sucking the breath from your lungs, and frozen fingers that I often lost feeling in.
- Red facial consequences. I am Black. Like, a milk chocolatey, darker brown Black. My ears, nose, and cheeks are not supposed to turn red. I have gorgeous, protective melanin that has protected me from that for the past 23 years of my life. (It also has made me extremely negligent in the case of sun screen, but I’m working on it.) This winter, I was as rosy cheeked as fracking Santa Claus between January and March.
- I missed much more school than I should’ve. It wasn’t just the combined hours I spent clearing, defrosting, and heating my car so that I could drive to campus. It wasn’t just the icy and insane road conditions that made the 3 mile journey to WSU semi-terrifying. It was the psychological impact. Many days I got out of my warm bed, looked at the tundra behind my windows, and said “Frack it. I can’t.”
- It destroyed my love of cherished Christmas songs. “Let It Snow”, “Frosty the Snowman”, “Winter Wonderland”, “Baby It’s Cold Outside”, “White Christmas”. This are just some of the songs that I loved in 2013 that I don’t think I’ll be able to listen to for the foreseeable future with having mild panic attacks.
- My parents live in Arizona, the land of 5% Black population, retirees, and Republicans carrying unconcealed guns in restaurants. After the umpteenth snowfall, I considered moving there, a truly desperate move.
- All conversations I started with people in my building centered around the weather. And to those brave souls who had dogs and I encountered them as they rode the elevator down to walk them, I applaud you. I would have walked Fido once in the foot deep weather, came home and taken off his little boots (which he legitimately needed in the weather). After that, I would’ve had to make a drop off at the pound. Seriously. I couldn’t take myself outside; you want me to bother with some mutt who will want to dig out the fire hydrants?
- I considered buying and carrying a flask for brandy, for legitimate medicinal (my SOUL was cold!) reasons.
- I didn’t wear shoes that weren’t my winter boots for 3 months. I could have probably gone to a black tie gala and I would have shown up with my winter boots under my ballgown and not given a frack.
- My skin was an alien. The briefest trips outside my apartment resulted in me looking like an extra from the Walking Dead: grey skin. Do you have any idea how much lotion entered and then apparently evaporated from my pours during the early months of 2014? Bottles of Curel. I would lather up before I left home, and get to legs as gray as the sky above me. My skin was always cold. Usually, I am warm to the touch. My mother used to tell me that hugging me was like hugging a furnace. Being outside for more that 5 minutes would result in me having to come home and lie around the apartment in the most unladylike positions, lest my limbs touch and the cold seep back into my bones. Scott gets bonus boyfriend points for literally rubbing my legs when I came over until I no longer felt like a corpse girlfriend.
- The hopelessness. This winter made me cry on a few occasions. Mostly, it just added to my feeling of helplessness. I couldn’t control the weather. I couldn’t make the winter stop. Hell, half the time I couldn’t even keep myself warm. I would get bad news and I would just start crying. The news made me sad about the world and the weather made me sad about tomorrow and I would blubber. A couple of times, the cold made my eyes water, which would then evolve into actual emotional tears because Why was it so damn cold? Once, I just started crying as I put on my many, many layers in the library as I prepared to walk to another building.
Good. I got it out of my system. Now, I can enjoy the breaking weather, the spring that they predict is going to be a lot less buggy than usual (good for me, bad for MI farmers), and look forward to summer dresses that show off my legs without carrying that resentment around.
Black Without Back 