A Chill In The Air

A Chill In The Air
I used to like summer once, for the same reason I liked snow days. They gave me a chance to exercise my teenage feminism while push mowing an acre one 17-year-old July, or to assert the never-ending quality of childhood when I made 20 small snow women all around my college campus in a blizzard (or what passes for one in Southeast Virginia.)

But the endless winter of 2009 tore away my love of the seasonal cold, as I had thought forever, until the summer of 2021 came and my mask, which had come to feel as essential as underwear, left me missing a lost year when I took it off and returned to my old routines.

My body had grown soft and the heat was oppressive. More than that I craved control — the delicious feeling of a planned vacation. And so it was we ended up, my husband and I, on a trip to Tasmania in June.

My only previous experience of Tasmania was seeing a cartoon devil in a desert. I hadn’t even known it was in Australia, much less that it contained one of the few places in that whole continent that get truly cold in the winter. (Australia, as I learned in a podcast only last year, experiences the height of winter in July, while Christmas brings it terrible summers of fire.)

I prepared myself for the change by reading bios of the Iceman, Wim Hof. My husband, not as much of an optimist, was absorbed in stories of Spearfish, South Dakota and Loma, Montana, places where the change was too rapid for the human body, up to 100 degrees different in a day.

When we got to Liawanee, there was a delicious chill in the air, a 40 degree bliss that made my husband Bob melt and start enjoying himself. Perhaps we didn’t really have to start viewing the world with such extremes after all.