The alarm bade me "face another day, George, God isn't through with you yet."
The coffee was reviving me as I looked out of my study window.
The landscape was completely white, save for six brave pickup trucks parked at the Uptown Cafe, wearing a thin, defiant coat of snow artfully done as by a paint artisan in an auto body shop. Thin, cold snow clung to the windows of the cafe.
Snow that clings and squeaks as vehicles roll over it suggests sub-zero cold. My computer display said minus 5 degrees, wind from the North at 10 miles per hour with gusts up to thirty. The chill factor is minus twenty-five to minus thirty-five below zero.
I went to the basement to light a fire in the wood furnace, being thankful for my wood supply. Last year the cold was so severe and unrelenting that I had run out of wood by mid-January, keeping only an emergency supply for power outages.
Back upstairs to my study I climbed, sat down at the computer and observed foolhardy folks running from their car to the cafe, clad only in thin jackets, wearing no hats, gloves or boots. Their jackets weren't even zipped up! I did that when I was young, but age and arthritis makes me bundle up in an Air Force survival parka with white fur bordering my hood. The rest of my body is covered with thick, warm boots over heavy socks, elk skin choppers on my hands with double woolen liners and a pair of snowmobile bibs. I am thankful that I live in a (personal) era in which I don't give a hoot what others wear or of their furtive glances at my survival gear.
I wonder at the thinly clad natives which are not young people but many of them in middle-age. Why this display of bravado? Is it an expression of indomitable defiance, toughness, resourcefulness or Sisu, in Finnish?
I recall an instance in my youth. I worked for Haven North Lodging in the capacity of maintenance. I went from unit to unit answering calls where there was no (electrical) heat, ( circuit breaker or thermostat setting.) Some couldn't get their fireplaces to draft. It helps if you open the damper. One unit had drained a keg of beer- on the floor and it leaked through the floor and soaked the basement carpeting and furniture. The unit was unoccupied, since the people were asked to leave. Hours with a shop-vac would ensue, but not this day.
Emergency calls precluded the picayune. One unit couldn't get their sliding patio doors to close. they had been left open all night in the arctic cold and were blocked with snow that had turned to ice. The occupants were in a hung-over state, explaining the situation. They had tried to force the door closed, taking it off the tracks. I had the urge to kill.
I went from unit to unit wearing an unlined wool jacket, hoodie underneath and Sorel boots. I was crowned with a genuine, Milwauke- made Kromer Cap, the kind that grandpa Axel wore as he walked to the Geneva Mine I defied the northwest wind and the monstrous wind chills. I was the hero as I jump-started someone's car with my Chevy Monte Carlo.
I had the illusion of toughness and I defied winter for several years until age crept in and I began to feel the cold with a keenness experienced as never before. Arthritis reminded me of how frail the human body is, and made me wonder if I could have avoided the arthritis by bundling up in my younger years.
No one could have forced me to bundle up. I was clad as the Uptown patrons of this morning. Bundling up was for sissies. For some reason people, both genders, will continue to defy the potentially lethal wind chills. For some reason setting up an image of a 'yooper' James Dean trumps common sense.
I was as guilty as anyone else of putting image before practicality.
