Last week, my daughter came home from school, laid her head down on the kitchen counter, and started to cry.
“I’m SO BOOOOOORED!” she sobbed.
This was after nearly two weeks with no outdoor recess due to below-freezing wind chills. February has been extra February-ish this year. The kids have spent most of the month indoors or in the car, going from school to home and back to school.
I’m the kind of mom who believes there is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing, and I usually have them bundle up and go outside to play no matter the weather. But even I have had to admit more than a few minutes outdoors isn’t a good idea when it is this cold.
The temperatures have been so low, they’ve also been starting school 2 hours late almost every day. Both kids cheer when the school calls to deliver the news, but the cheers have become a little bit less jubilant with each late start as it means it will KEEP BEING COLD. Today, school was canceled altogether. It’s the coldest day so far in this long stretch of cold days, and it’s supposed to be just as cold tomorrow.
A few years ago, our little corner of the world had the distinction of being the coldest place on earth for a short time. I’m very thankful I was living here then because it helped me put all other occurrences of cold weather in perspective. Just a minute ago, my husband sent me a text message with a picture from the pickup’s dashboard thermometer that read -23.
“At least we aren’t the coldest place on earth,” I thought as I watched the thick fingers of ice creep up the inside of all our windows.
Writing about these cold snaps has become a yearly occurrence, and that has been interesting to notice, too. Last year around this time, I wrote: “While we are experiencing our arctic blast, the actual coldest place on earth is in far northern Canada, where temps measured -74 F. The eleventh coldest place is Edmonton, Alberta, where it got down to -50 F. Compared to that, our -29 F is downright balmy. Sure, we could toss a pot of boiling water out the door and watch it instantly vaporize in mid-air … but our negative double-digit temperatures were a lot closer to 0 than -100, and that’s saying something.
This may sound like schadenfreude, but it’s not. It’s that I appreciate being reminded that things that feel potentially unsurvivable are, in fact, survivable. We’ve survived them before. So have others, including everyone who lives in Edmonton, Alberta. We are going to be OK. And it’s not the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” mindset either. It’s the “what doesn’t kill you means you get to continue being alive,” which is an ethos I am embracing for 2024.
This coming weekend, I will turn 47. That sounds much older than I feel, but is also the youngest I will ever be again. This morning, rereading that column from last year, I have to admit I was impressed with my past self for thinking of that last line: “what doesn’t kill you means you get to continue to be alive.” I had forgotten it, and it is a very good mantra — one that I will now be using for 2025 as well.
The last few years have been the hardest of my life in a way that has often felt as unrelenting as deep cold, and it has changed me. Or maybe it hasn’t changed me at all. Maybe it has actually made me more myself — I have less time and energy to try and be anyone else. What a gift.
In previous versions of a column about the bleak chill of Dakota winter, I would have ended by reminding us all that cold can’t last forever, and that spring will come eventually. Now, instead, I am looking out the window and marveling at the buttered yellow sunlight layered across the diamond blue of the snow-packed fields made more beautiful because of, not in spite of, the cold.
