Winter, You Now Suck

There.  I've said it.  Despite all my poetic expressions of love for winter, for white snow, for clear night skies, and refreshingly cold air, I am begging for a divorce from winter.

Our 10-day forecast here in Iowa predicts continued cold through March 6, with daytime temperatures never getting above 20, and most nights going below zero.  One of those coming nights is expected to be -23!  That's the real temperature, none of that candyass windchill stuff.

I never thought I'd beg for mud season.

 It has been a hard winter, and now it's setting in to be a long and bitterly cold one.

Iowa got real cold sometime before Thanksgiving.  I know this because I wrote a poem about a frozen dead pig on the side of the road.  Around the same time, we received our first measurable snowfall and we haven't seen the ground since, or the dead pig.   Most areas have received more than 50 inches of snow so far.  It is piled in rugged white mountains along country roads and in parking lots in town.

I don't mind the snow so much, but this bone-rattling cold is taking a toll on everyone.  In town, the ground is frozen solid more than two feet down. Nearly 200 homes and businesses have frozen sewer lines and water pipes.  The diner is slower than a typical February.  The check-out girls at the local Fareway talk about how quiet the store is these days.  The cold is all we can talk about; it's our devil.

We try to convince ourselves that spring is 'just around the corner', something we say at the beginning of every February, because we know the end of February starts the Great Thaw, and the ground becomes a saturated sponge of mud and slush, unleashing our first dreams of spring blossoms.

We know spring is near, but no one is buying it.

It Could Have Been Verse

I've been on hiatus the past two weeks; the first week was a scheduling adjustment, waking up at 3am most mornings.  It was a busy week that included a catering job which led to the second week of down time.

I'd fended off a cold for most of January.  The catering job required a lot of loading and unloading from my vehicle to the venue and back again in near zero temperatures, and the morning after, I awoke with a minor ear infection, which blossomed into a severe sinus infection and both ears infected.  A wracking cough developed, and it felt as though my head were being held underwater.

I missed a couple days of work, too sick and too miserable to do much more than wish I were better.

And that is what this post is all about.

Rita Mae Brown once advised writers to live healthy, that it required stamina and physical well-being to sit at the keyboard or confront the blank sheet of paper.  She said a writer should never write when drunk or under the influence of any drug; it might seem to lead to creative thought, but your thoughts are not clear.

I can say the same for illness.  Despite the down time spent lying on the sofa or in bed, time I might have otherwise used to write, or even read, I felt so miserable that all creative thought was banished, replaced by an endless prayer for relief.

Even with prescribed antibiotics and the slow return to normal, my creative mind is sluggish, clogged with the virus.

Here I am though, writing away the cobwebs, the sludge of a cold and feeling better each day.  There are notes for a poem, more ideas for future blog posts and the other night, I was able to sit down and do some editing on the poems written in November.

I might have experienced some guilt for missing a couple weeks of writing, but I have let that go with the realization that when you are ill, or dealing with a new stress (like waking up at 3am every day), it's okay to put your creativity aside.  If you see poetry everywhere around you, if you imagine whole stories in the atomic split of a second, if you find wonder in words, you will return to your creative self when you're ready.