Baby, it’s cold outside….

Mid-morning it was still -8 degrees outside here on the prairie. The local cycle shop owner, from whom we’ve bought two bikes, couldn’t come look at the broken treadmill because his shop pipes were frozen. When we stopped in to talk treadmills with him later in the evening, he said this is the worst winter he remembers in a decade and a half. When he was a kid, he said, winters like this were the norm.

Brrrrrrr.

It’s pretty wretched also in West Virginia, where we lived for fifteen years. And my long-time friend in Erie, Pennsylvania, romance writer Holly Jacobs, e-mailed me she spent 51 minutes shoveling that lake effect snow today.

She kept track.

I spent the first 20 years of my life in Michigan, home to many lakes and much lake effect snow. From the middle of sixth grade until the end of my sophomore year in high school, my family lived in Sault Ste. Marie, across the ‘river’ from Soo, Ontario. Cold country, people. See-your-breath-snow-to-the-rooftops country.

I don’t ever remember being cold, except once. And then it wasn’t in the winter. My 7^th grade science teacher, Mr. Herring, took a small group of us camping in late October in the northern Michigan woods. I’ve never been so cold in my life. Needless to say, my idea of camping is staying at the Holiday Inn.

A couple people have gently suggested that perhaps age has something to do with feeling the cold more now. You know who you are. Thanks.

But I think it’s not just the aging body, it’s the aging frame of mind. Certainly, I have more padding now to keep me warm than I did then.

Who has time to feel the cold when you’re a freshman in high school besotted with a senior boy with beautiful blond hair whose mother is one of your mother’s best friends from church? A boy who gave you a ride home from school on a frigid winter day because, even though you got a ride to school, you always walked home. Everybody did. Unless they could drive. Michigan kids are tough. Or were.

I’ve become a winter wimp, whining and complaining like I invented the concepts.

No more. I’m gonna channel that inner 15-year-old who went snowmobiling with another boy -- some pretty cute boys in the mitten state, but I married a wonderful Iowa boy -- on a snowy winter night through the woods with a group of friends and never felt the cold.

And I may take to wearing my new pink snuggie out of the house.

A Sense of Place

For more than a decade I taught beat reporting to journalism students at West Virginia University. This was always their first assignment:

Interview one classmate on what/where his or her favorite place was as a child.

Consider the following:

• location
• sights, sounds, smells it evokes
• memories involved
• ever revisited?
• Still derive comfort, enjoyment, etc. from it?

After the interview: Making as much use of description as possible, write a short story (minimum 1/2 page).

Every semester ‘grandma’s house’ was the winner, followed closely by the beach or a backyard filled with swing sets and childhood innocence.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about place, especially this week when a ‘storm of the century’ blizzard whipped across the prairie, dumping snow, bringing fierce temperatures and high winds.

I grew up in Michigan, and even though I haven’t lived there in nearly 30 years, that still defines me. When I was 14, my best friend was Heidi Flower. Her German-born mom, artist Helga Flower, made the best ever peanut butter balls dipped in chocolate. To this day I can close my eyes and taste that perfect sweetness and feel the dry chill of that particular Sault Ste. Marie December.

Perhaps because the following month, a boy kissed me for the first time.

I married an Iowa boy, and years later gave birth to my first son, Erik, in Flagstaff, Arizona during one of the coldest Decembers on record in the Southwest.

We moved to West Virginia, had another son, Andrew, and spent 15 years in that rugged, beautiful state before moving to Nebraska.

After this blustery week, even a Michigan girl who has lived in Iowa and hauled a bundled baby to the pediatrician during the winter of 1991 when 80 inches of snow fell in one month in Flagstaff, Arizona…gets defeated.

Now in addition to missing the Great Lakes and the San Francisco Peaks, I miss the Appalachian falls and springs.

I ask my son in Germany what the weather is like, remembering the beautiful snowfall we encountered on our visit two years ago. His answer is always the same: rainy, cold, dreary.

The prairie is growing on me…slowly. I’m learning to appreciate the year-round blue skies, something I missed intensely when we moved from Arizona to West Virginia. I remind myself it rained non-stop that first fall in Morgantown, West Virginia when Erik was a toddler, and we were both used to being able to go to the park every day. Instead of noticing the lack of trees, I’m starting to find the trees.

A friend of mine, poet and essayist Rob Merritt, teaches English at a college in Virginia. He was born in North Carolina, which seems like a foreign country to a northern girl. He writes about place in The Nantahala Review.

I’m thinking place can be fluid, carried around inside of us then coaxed out when we need the memory of that first kiss to take away the chill of mid-life.