It is Sunday night and I am sitting on the floor of the bathroom while my two children have a bath. I believe that if I can’t remember the last time my children have had a bath then it is probably time for one. So tonight it is. Usually my more patient husband does the bathing but alas, he is on his way to San Diego for a conference.
My husband said that he would rather stay here then fly “as far as possible from Madison without leaving the lower 48” but when I look at the snow outside it is hard to believe him. We have only been in real winter here for about five days and already I yearn for the feeling of sunshine on my shoulders.
Winter doesn’t officially start for another 14 days but what we think of as winter in Wisconsin swept in last Sunday with snow and very cold temperatures. If you had asked me about winter six days ago I would have said that I was wishing for snow and not worried about it all. After just a few days of real cold I have been brutally reminded why people move south.
After you have a baby there seems to be some sort of hormone that makes you forget about the struggles of pregnancy, pain of labor and hardships of the first few months. The same seems to be true of winter (I am coining the term winter amnesia). Some things that I had forgotten about include: the freezing of everything in my car including lip gloss, the half banana left in the back seat, the ink in my ball point pen and a bottle of water. I also forgot about my car windows freezing shut until I went to the dry cleaners drive through window and found myself unable to communicate with the nice lady as I failed to open my windows and was too close to her building to open my door.
Oddly the winter amnesia thing seems to strike on a daily basis. Multiple times a day I feel warm indoors and then neglect to put my jacket and gloves in BEFORE going outside. Once I get outside it is so cold that it then takes me ten minutes to warm up once I do put my jacket on gloves on. You would think I would learn!
Humans are one of the few species to populate such a wide range of the world’s climates. Could it be winter amnesia that makes this possible? Ask me again in spring when my memory of this winter disappeared.