ReRun: If I Meet Winter In A Dark Alley I Will Thrash It With A Garland Of Spring Flowers

Winter is coming to Upstate New York, and with it the melancholy that I wrestle every year as the season changes.  The air gets colder and the sky darker and the green earth turns grey, and before I can embrace hibernation I rage against the change.  Can there be melancholy and rage?  I think there can.  The rage is suppressed, helpless, like violence hidden underneath a heavy blanket of snow.  Like frostbite eating away at your fingers and toes while you sit, so tired and still, as if in a trance, slowly freezing.

I should be grateful that it's December (or that we can pretend it is for the sake of a rerun) and winter is only now rearing it's ugly head.  I am not.  At least not right now.  This is not a grateful post.  This is the end of a long, lonely day covered by a cloudy sky and full of dirty floors and unending laundry.  This post is about boredom, and the purgatory of transition.  It's about resistance to inevitable change and stubborn, futile defiance, digging heels in when it makes no sense whatsoever to do so.

It's about the start of winter.

I don't want to go gentle into these dark, endless nights and days.  Winter lasts for months upon months in Upstate New York!  I don't want patience.  I want to rage like the rainstorms of early spring, melting ice with explosive strength.  I want to burst into technicolor like buds on trees in March; I want to sweep away the debris that gets hidden under the snow; clean the streets with a wild, maniacal energy.  I want to bare my teeth and rip berries from their vines before they have the chance to ripen; I'm so hungry for winter to be over before it begins. 

Winter, you leave me no choice but submission, and in the meantime melancholy and a silent, seething rage.  I'll play a collection of short films in my mind tonight and in each and every one I will be the heroine and you will be the villain and I will best you with ever more colorful, creative schemes.  Tonight I will melt you with the fire in my mind.  Tonight I will annihilate you.  And in the morning I will wake to your bleak and unforgiving landscape just outside my bedroom window.

Tomorrow, you bastard, I will sigh and begin to embrace you.