November rain

It snowed all weekend and now the landscape is in perfect postcard shape. Or it was until my family and I rushed outside and stamped all over said landscape. People, they're everywhere.

Snow angels, snowballs, snowmen, toboggans and snow plows, and roughing it outdoors for all it's worth since it will all turn to slosh in a day or two. For now, it is a winter wonderland, and I much prefer it to the normative gray and grim November. And October. And December. January... Somebody stop me.

I'm stuck in Scandinavia for the time being. This isn't a suitable climate for humans, and I'm not fit for human consumption when the sun doesn't shine for a week or three. I know it's out there, but I need proof. I need to see it. I need it. The desolate dark and the even bleaker stamp it imprints on people's faces is all the evidence I need to confirm the nagging suspicion that some of our ancestors had brains the size of peanuts.

They traveled north and did not travel back south after experiencing their first winter? Those who did not starve or freeze their hinds off must have been too weak to move a muscle when summer finally arrived. And it is devious, the Nordic summer. It's a trickster. It is breathtakingly beautiful, such an unbelievable metamorphosis you stop to stare at it in awe and forget to run for your life and some warmer spot on the map.

Before you know it, it's winter again and you're stuck. Maybe that's what happened to those poor pilgrims. Nature seduced them into thinking it would be all right. It takes all my spirit to step out into a cold, rainy, windy November day and smile. No one else is smiling, why should I go first? It takes imagination to remember the sun, that it still shines, that it even exists.

It will soon be summer in my southern home. That much I know for a fact, that I can remember vividly. So I concentrate on that image, dig it up, conjure it with all my might; that invincible summer Monsieur Camus wrote about lying within me. It tugs at the corner of my mouth, seducing me into thinking it will be all right, to keep on smiling even if only to irk the natives.

That is what people will think you're trying to do: throw them off course, mess with them. Or they will think you're plain crazy. What is there to smile about on a cold November day? Looking out the window at the cotton covered landscape while thinking about the sun ascending over my favorite beach strip, the best of both worlds... Plenty, my friends, plenty.