I'm freezing...and it's kind of awesome.

I never expected to like the cold.  It's never really been my thing.  I spent my formative years in northeastern Arizona, where--to answer the inevitable question--we do indeed get snow, and temps occasionally sink into the teens or (gasp) even the single digits.  As a kid it didn't seem like a big deal.  As an adult, however, I am not a fan.  I've been known to spend entire Christmas vacations scuttling between warm places, sending other people to run errands and demanding my minions bring me food so I don't have to leave my blanket-nest on the couch.  I blame my husband's job, which has taken us mostly south and east, where people's idea of cold means you have to put on socks with your sandals.

Then we moved to Alaska.  Suddenly I was in a world of wool socks and layering fleece-lined stockings with jeans, a place where the cold could literally, not just figuratively, kill you.  This did not bode well for me.

(The above picture is from our latest cold spell last week)

We came in a year with the latest first snowfall since the 80s, with no appreciable snow until October 20th.  Once it fell, though, it didn't leave.  My past experience with snow is that it is freaking cold, pretty while it's happening, then it turns to gray slush for a day or two and then mud for a week.  Not exactly the stuff of Hallmark movies. 

Not here, oh no.  There is a strata of snow that dates all the way back to October, and layers have just been added to with every flurry over the last three months.  People told me constantly how awful the winters are here, how dark and dreary and long.  I rushed to make contingency plans for the winter, stock up on vitamin D, and get my oh-so-fly minivan winterized so we didn't all die because the car wouldn't start or the tires couldn't grip the super-slick roads.  I was anxious for the first three weeks we were here, and when that first snow-storm hit us in October I went to sleep a wreck.

I woke up to the inside of a snowglobe. 

The trees were frosted white, and the ground evenly layered with snow that literally freaking sparkled in the late sunrise.  The delight didn't fade when the temperatures kept dropping and the snow kept coming.  The first time we had to clean our driveway, Rick laughed at me because I was so happy about the "mountains" we were building on the edge of our lawn, the largest of which I named Caradhras. I loved kicking through the fresh snow when I took out the trash.  When the plows came to remove the 4-foot piles of snow we'd cultivated, the kids and I were equally distraught (even though, in all fairness, it was getting ridiculously hard to find places to add snow). Watching the day shrink until we averaged four hours of sunlight or noticing the 100 degree difference between the temperatures inside and outside the house just excited me. When we got back from Arizona in January, I spent one of the happiest half-hours I can remember excavating the van from 15 inches of snow before we could drive home after a 14 hour flight.  I'd been freezing all week long in Arizona where it never dropped below 35 degrees, but I was invigorated in sub-zero Alaska.

It might just be Stockholm's, but I think it's more.  It is a recurring theme I've noticed over the last decade and change of adulthood, something you hear a lot in the military community: bloom where you are planted.  Over the last twelve years Rick has dragged us all around the country--Savannah, where you can chew the air during the summer; D.C., where the roads make no sense and going to the store practically requires a lobbyist and political agenda; Yuma, which should have objectively been the worst--a small post fifteen miles from the town itself, in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, surrounded by dirt and spikey devil-bushes, where walking outside in the height of summer was like getting hit in the face with a hot cast-iron pan.  That, however, is the place that I remember most fondly.  In fact, everywhere had something redemptive.  You just had to find it.  We met so many people who, blinded by their circumstances, spent huge portions of their lives pissed off and complaining about things outside of their control, ignoring the things that they can actually change. It wasn't exactly shocking that they had such a miserable time.

Take what you can from that.  I'm going to play in the snow.