Exposure

Churches early and present talk of "purifying fires" but I always preferred the idea of a purifying cold, myself. Cold is, in many ways, a distiller, an equalizer, forcing on the same heavy coats, nullifying all individual smell, and making dance out of everybody's breath. When I say cold, of course, I mean cold as in a low temperature, and I do not mean rain or snow or wind. Those romantic symbols of winter are about as awesome as Christmas music: It's mildly exhilarating the first time it comes along, but even then the dread of the upcoming months is creeping through your skull.

I never thought the cold was quite as annoying as was the warmth that went into it. I put on four careful layers to head out into negative digit-weather, but soon I enter a warm store and it feels like Texas in July. I don't think it's a coincidence that frozen body parts don't really start hurting until they're unthawed. Cold is numbing, it's the warming up that's painful.

The revered White Christmas came early for a lot of the US this month, snowing as much as a couple feet in parts of the Midwest. People froze. A woman in Nebraska died when a snow plow accidentally backed over her. In Winnipeg, the Canadian city I was born in, the low tonight is 11 below zero, with a toasty high of ten above tomorrow (That's 24 and 12 below, respectively, for the metric folk). It's this cold every winter. Some people will hit black ice on the highway, skid off the road and die in these revered snowdrifts, as also happens every winter. The White Christmas kills a scattered few, as it does every year.

Many years ago my high school girlfriend and I had a terrible New Year's Eve. We argued late, driving to her house, and went to bed unhappy. The next morning it had snowed a couple inches. If this had been forecast, we weren't aware of it. We played and kissed in the snow and ran around with her dog. The trouble of the night before didn't come up again. At some point my stepfather pulled into the driveway with an urgent mandate that I come home right away and learn how to drive in snow. I was lividly opposed but of course it happened and - as I reflect on auto maneuvers last winter when the city of Portland received a quizzical foot of snow - undoubtedly for the best.

I still see the pictures of us, melodramatic teenagers, playing in the snow, her dog running over the wings of our snow angels, and so I'm still not sure what to make of something so deadly and cruel that is also, at the same time, such a perfect miracle.