Baby, It’s Cold Outside.

Yesterday while on the telephone with D, he informed me that it was cold in California because it was 50 degrees, Fahrenheit. It was evening, so I in no way doubt the accuracy of his weather assertions, but I do doubt the assertion that 50 degrees is cold. It was 16 degrees here in Minnesota. Baby, it’s chilly — not quite as chilly as it will get here — but, just the same, chilly.

I admit that living in Arkansas for the past six years, before I moved home last month, has made me the weak little duckling. For the past six years, I’ve only spent about three weeks each year of the winter here in Minnesota, if even that, and it was generally at the mildest points. Plus, I was on Christmas vacation or only had a week of work off, or something, and I didn’t have to go outside if I didn’t want to. I didn’t have to experience what I like to call snot-freezin’ weather, and yes, I really do mean that sometimes it gets so cold that when you inhale sharply, your nose hairs get all stiff, and your snot freezes. It is quite the exhilarating sensation. When my brother and I were younger, we used to put booties and jackets on our dogs to let them go outside to poo. We made a doggie jacket out of an old jacket that belonged to our grandpa, and we called it the dogs’ Starter Jacket. I have a Starter Jacket of my own from seventh grade, a real one of the Phoenix Suns, and I am sometimes known to embarrassingly don that jacket to go outside here because the jacket is very warm. It is also very humiliating for a classy girl like me, but in the dead of winter around here, people don’t really care about humiliating — they only care about warm.

I have spent probably a fourth of my life wearing snow pants. One of my favorite feelings as a child was coming in from playing in the snow when all my snow clothes were soaking wet, only to peel off all those wet clothes, don my second set of warm, dry snow clothes, and run right back out again. We Clippertons were experienced and knew how to make this sensation especially enjoyable by setting out the dry clothes on the old fashioned heat radiator beforehand, so when we came in to change, the new clothes would be toasty. I remember exactly what it feels like to pull on those mittens, that sense of joyous relief, when the wet becomes dry and the cold becomes warm.

And even though it was 16 degrees yesterday, it was also a joyous day because I woke up to fat, white flakes falling from the hazy sky. We only got a dusting, a teaspoon dose that lingered in the corners of the streets and between the blades of grass, but still, it is coming. I can’t think of anything more fun right now than borrowing my mom’s snowmobiling suit from the 1970s and running out to the park in the cold and snow with my two-year-old niece, to brave the frozen snot, all for the sake of sliding down a hill on our butts over a piece of brightly colored, thin plastic.

Or, if we don’t have sleds around here anymore, we can use a snow shovel, because as an experienced Clipperton Snow Person, let me tell you, it works.