"How do you like the weather?"

I've lived at my Massachusetts address longer than I’ve lived in any one place since 1992 when I was fourteen and we moved from Shreveport to Covington, Louisiana. Even combining two different addresses, I’ve now lived in Massachusetts longer than I lived in Hawaii, New York, or Texas. Yet every day when I leave the house some stranger hears my southern accent and asks, “Where are you from?” I try to remind myself that they’re not trying to be mean. After all I do dress, behave, and talk differently, but it’s frustrating. I’ve lived in New England longer than I’ve lived anywhere since Middle School and I’m clearly still viewed as an outsider.

I understand the concept of micro aggressions now.

The worst part of the whole deal isn’t the daily reminder that I’ll never fit in or be accepted. Truth is, I don’t want to fit in, though a little bit of acceptance would be fine. The real irritation is that the conversation is ALWAYS the same. It starts with “Where are you from?” Then it goes to “I like your accent.” From there I’ll get to hear a travelogue of the speakers various vacations south of the Mason Dixon Line, Yankees really seem to love South Carolina, Florida, and Magnolia Market in Waco, Texas. (Which why ya'll? I like the South. I like Texas. Waco sucks.) Then there will be a misunderstanding about basic geography, folks in New England really don’t get how far away Memphis, New Orleans, and Houston are from each other and assume we’re all close neighbors. Then they ask the other, inevitable, question…

“How do you like the weather?”

Your average New Englander always asks "How do you like the weather?" in a tone like I’m supposed to hate it. They stand and wait expectantly for me to say it’s too cold, dark, and snowy. (Or too hot, they really do think July is hot and humid in Massachusetts and LOL folks I’m from fucking Louisiana and our first summer in Austin had 100 days of over 100 degree temperatures, Massachusetts ain’t hot. Ever.) Then the stranger inevitably gets huffy when I answer, “I dunno. I kinda like it."

You don’t realize how much the East and West Coast dominates pop culture when you live in LA, Seattle, New York, or Boston. You don’t get how much music, movies, television and books is geared toward these two coasts, but when you grow up in fly over country you know. There’s no reason I should know neighborhood names in a city I’ve never been to. There’s no reason I should know street names and addresses to places I’ve never visited, but I do, and I bet you do too, because we’ve been bombarded with Broadway and 5th Avenue and Hollywood and Vine since the day we were born. For decades most major TV shows were set on the beach, or in a place where it snowed on Christmas. I grew up surrounded by images of Christmas sweaters, scarfs, sleigh rides and caroling in the snow. I was raised on “White Christmas” and “Frosty the Snowman”. New England winter was presented as the norm.

My cousins and I were all big fans of Bill Watterson’s “Calvin and Hobbes” with all it’s imagery of winter adventures, monstrous snow men, hair raising toboggan rides and snowball fights but we never, not once, experienced it for ourselves.

You see, growing up in the Deep South, you just don’t get a whole lot of snow.

My home town of Shreveport, Louisiana averages less than an inch of snow a year and often goes several years in a row without flakes. The record snow was 11” that fell in 1929. There’s old black and white photos of my dad and his brothers playing in what would be described as a “plowable” snow some time back in the 1950s. There’s a photo of my mom’s High School best friend ice skating on a frozen Cross Lake sometime in the 70s. There’s pictures of me in a coat on Christmas eve in the 80s, but I don’t remember ever seeing much more than a coating of snow during my childhood, just enough to build a stunted, undersized, snowman with enough left over on the cars to throw a snowball or two at your little brother. I only remember one snow day and it didn’t even snow that week. Cold weather and freezing rain coated the bridges and the city didn’t have salt sand, or trucks to spread it, so we had a brief vacation because the school bus couldn't safely pick us up. We tried to build a sled and ride it down the ice slick, concrete, sidewalk but failed miserably. We “ice skated” on the sheet of ice frozen in the bed of my dad’s F150. Moving to St. Tammany Parish in far Southeastern Louisiana didn’t improve our chances of seeing snow.

When I left home at 17 I’d experienced maybe 3” total of snowfall. I’d never seen a snow shovel, snow blower (or a basement) and I didn’t own a proper winter coat. Then the Army sent me to Hawaii.

Ironically, there I saw real snow for the first time, high on top of the volcano Muana Kea that towered about the Army’s Pohokuloa Training Area on the big island of Hawaii. The camp is at the same elevation as Denver and the air was thin and cold but even then flakes didn’t fall where we were. We would get snowed on the next November in Japan. But that snow quickly became slush, and the slush created mud, and the rural camp we lived on was gray, damp, cold and overrun by some type of angry forest ape. Still, the Japanese country side was beautiful in the brief moment I saw it covered in a thin blanket of fresh snow.

I was twenty-one years old before I saw a “plowable” snow. In fact it was on my drive from New Orleans to Fort Drum in early February 1999 that I first witnessed significant snowfall. I was so ill prepared for the weather that when I stopped to visit family in Virginia I had to borrow money to buy a proper coat before heading further North. I only had a checkbook and their local hardware store didn’t accept out of state checks. I made it to Pennsylvania before I witnessed my first legitimate snow fall. I was driving a 1986 Ford F150, two wheel drive with four on the floor and normal street tires when the first flakes started falling on I-81 and I panicked because I’d never driven in the snow before. So I stopped and spent the night drinking whiskey sours and listening to Indian music in the bar of a Scranton, PA motel, waiting out flurries that barely registered for the locals.

Fort Drum was an experience for a southern kid fresh off the plane from Hawaii. There was more snow on the ground when I arrived in February than I’d ever seen combined and more on the way every day. I grew up in a world where the mere threat of flakes would shut a city down and found myself in a place where the stop signs were mounted on ten foot poles and the fire hydrants had flags so they could be found when buried in a snow bank. I went from never owning a real winter coat to running PT in falling snow. Even the gear was different. They didn't issue trigger finger mittens, neck gaiters, and Mickey Mouse boots at Schofield Barracks. I'd never seen cross country skis, snow shoes or cargo sleds until the Army forced me to inventory them.

The snow was probably my favorite thing about that God awful post. Most guys hate the weather at Fort Drum, but I secretly loved it. Sure the cold sucked when you had to run PT, but I still had that childish love of a snow day. I loved the morning after a big snowfall when the world was bright and blue and covered in a sheet of brilliant white. I liked late night guard shifts in the cold quiet when the snow fall muffled sounds and changed the way the light looked and the world felt close and quiet and soft. I loved tear assing down tank trails in HMMWVs and LMTVs. I liked taking out our Army issued skis and sliding awkwardly down the small hill in front of my shop on lazy afternoons. I liked not sweating my ass off. I liked living without bugs for eight months out of the year. I liked not having to mow the grass or police call the lawn because it was buried in snow. I may be a proud southerner, but I’ve never liked being hot. The cold weather in upstate New York suited me, if little else did.

Changing seasons and snow were two things that attracted me to Massachusetts when my spouse first started looking for jobs. We visited Boston for the first time during the historic winter of 2015 and my first taste of Massachusetts winter was strolling around a common covered in feet of snow. When we’d left Austin the day before it been seventy degrees with severe thunderstorms and we landed in a world that was crisp and cold and covered in white. My only complaint was the buildings were kept too hot for my taste. Walking into a store or restaurant felt like stepping into a blast furnace after spending a few hours wandering the cold streets. The idea of winter weather, the thought of snow, was a big selling point when we were offered a job in Massachusetts. I was happy my kid would eventually have the White Christmas I always wanted.

And they did. It snowed nine inches our first Christmas Day in Massachusetts. My mother was visiting and she saw more snow on that Christmas morning than she’d seen in her entire life prior combined. Santa Claus brought sleds and we spent the afternoon sledding down the small hill beside my house. I still love the glow of colored Christmas lights buried in fresh, white, snow.

I had never shoveled snow before moving to New England. In fact I'm not sure I'd ever touched a snow shovel. I was a senior specialist and a sergeant at Fort Drum and my snow removal experience there consisted of walking into a room, pointing at two privates and saying, “Grab a shovel and get to work dickheads, don’t forget to put down salt” but I discovered I rather liked the chore. I’m a shovel at the end of the day guy, not so much because it let’s me get ahead of the snow but because it gives me an excuse to be outside, alone, in the quiet dark, surrounded by fresh falling snow.

Sure I had to buy a thousand dollars worth of snow pants, jackets, wool base layers, insulated rubber boots and knit caps. Sure I had to buy snow shovels, brushes, ice chippers, a snow blower and a roof rake and learn how and when to use them all. But I got to build a no shit snow man complete with a carrot nose. I got to go sledding and throw snowballs with my kid. I got to walk on a frozen lake and listen to the ice hiss and groan and pop while trying and failing to catch fish through the ice. I love being in the woods when they’re covered in snow. The ground was covered the day I shot my six point, I could hear him crunching through the snow before I saw him. I even went snow skiing one year. I never made it past the children’s hill, but it was fun trying to learn and my kid, like most kids, took to it like a duck to water. For a decade I liked winter and snow.

Honestly, it always struck me as a little weird how the people who’d grown up with a real winter and significant snow seemed to hate it so much. For almost a decade I didn’t get it. I looked forward to the change of seasons. I liked colder weather. I LOVED snow.

Past tense.

I get it now. Last weekend we had a two day snow storm that dumped between one and two feet of snow on the region. I tried to keep up with shoveling over the course of the storm but failed miserably. Every time I “finished”, ever time I put the snow shovel down, it would begin snowing again harder than before. I shoveled my driveway three times and it still took me over five hours to dig out once the storm was passed. Snowplows shove the snow off the road and into my driveway and aggressive drivers speeding down my residential street make it impossible to safely and easily remove the icy hump at the foot of my drive. If I dig out our cars first it compacts the snow in the driveway making it harder to shovel when I’m done with the cars but if I wait until the driveway is clear then I end up knocking snow off the cars and onto the driveway meaning I essentially shovel the drive twice. With almost two feet of snow on the ground I rapidly run out of places to push it. I have to dig out the fire hydrant by the road, all while dodging the passing cars. I also have to dig out a space for the dog who won’t poop unless he can see grass. The whole time I'm either freezing or sweating and sweat kills.

Even without the snow the cold has been brutal. With two feet of snow on the ground and clear skies temperatures have stayed below freezing for weeks now with wind chills below zero most mornings while we wit for the bus and every night when I walk the dog. It’s genuinely dangerous to go outside. It takes ten minutes just to dress to do basic outdoor chores. Insulated bibs. Insulated rubber boots. Parka. Face mask. Gloves. Knit hat. I put on fifteen pounds of gear and it doesn't keep me warm, just safe from the extreme cold, and then only briefly. The cold still leaks through the layers the same way it seeps through every crack in our somehow under insulated Massachusetts home, leaving me forever chilly. The ice and salt somehow gets tracked in through every door and onto every carpet. My floors are wrecked. My electric bill is doubled. My gas bill is crazy high, and yet I’m still cold. I wear sweatpants, socks and a wool hoody around the house and I’m still shivering. Some days it feels like I’ll never be warm again.

I’m tired of it.

After a decade I understand now why folks in New England hate the winter weather. After weeks of sub-freezing temperatures, with two feet of old snow on the ground and the threat of a blizzard this weekend, I am finally done with winter and snow. There’s no amount of hot chocolate, snow men, snow balls, or winter sports that will make up for the way my face hurts and my hands ache when I spend more than a few seconds out doors. There’s no sledding hill that can make up for five hours worth of snow removal and an ice dam on my roof. I still enjoy the quiet solitude of snow falling on night time woods and I still appreciate the sight of a blanket of fresh snow on a cold, clear, winter, morning, but I can’t take any more of the arctic chill on the North wind. It’s just not fun anymore, knowing that even when it does thaw the world will be muddy and gray and smell of mold and rot. Even if next weekend’s blizzard misses, which is a big maybe at this point, and this is our last big snow of the winter, all I have to look forward to is mud and sticks and trash and a chill that lingers deep into April.

I get it now. I understand why New Englanders flee south. God knows I wanna go home. I wanna feel sunlight on the back of my neck again. After a decade I’m tired of the cold. I’ve had my white Christmas. I’ve built a snow man and had a snow ball fight. I’ve gone sledding and skiing. I’ve got it out of my system and I’m over it. I want to wear a t-shirt to Christmas dinner again. I want to sweat in January. I am so tired of wearing layers. I’ve finally had enough snow.

The blizzard that we've been watching for over a week thankfully didn't produce. It's brutally cold, but we haven't seen a flake. I think this is the first time in 47 years I've been glad to miss out on snow.

Meanwhile, you know how sometimes you start doing a thing because it's fun, like for example attaching country songs to blog posts, but then you run out of inspiration or you write about something challenging and the "fun" little thing slowly becomes a chore. Anyway, here's two country songs about snow.