In Praise of Miserable Weather

Any person who has lived in the Chicago region for any length of time knows miserable weather. The temperature hovers at around 32 degrees, a damp wind angles right in your face the mix of snow/sleet/rain/ice pellets descending from the flat, dull-aluminum-colored sky, and slushy snow slumps on the ground. Our winters are famous for this. Residents moan and complain. People migrate south to escape. Not for us the pristine whiteness, the invigorating crispness of the northern or mountain winter.

I've missed this weather.

Last winter and the early part of this one I've waited and worried, sulked, even; but now, at last, we've got it--all of the above plus the added bonus of occurring when the snowdrops are blooming and it should, as meteorologists inform us, be heading towards the 40s.

It's the kind of weather I imagine they were having in Japan, the old Japan of wooden and paper houses and no central heat when a traveler, I think American, in a story I once heard, complained of the cold. He was wishing for sturdy walls and a roaring fire and wondering why on occasion they opened the doors to view the snow--and an old woman replied, "it's winter. You're supposed to be cold." She was perhaps wondering why this person was so ignorant as to not understand that one is supposed to endure the cold, yet appreciate the aesthetics of miserable weather.

So I go out for snow walks. Yesterday I found myself by the pond at Thatcher woods in a landscape of black, white and gray. I stood in the quiet, looking around as a fresh breeze bearing ghostly precipitation came off the not-quite-frozen water, slushy with rotten snow. I heard a woodpecker, then saw it fly to a snaggy oak, where it commenced its bobbing vertical walk.

Basho, the great Japanese poet, wrote many haiku about winter. Here is one (translated by Robert Hass):

Winter solitude--
in a world of one color,
the sound of wind


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