I'm longing for that sweet fatback that sticks to your ribs

I’m not sure I’m doing all that well with winter. It’s like a daily checklist: am I getting outside? Am I doing something other than sitting on the couch with my crochet? How many baked goods?

The snow covers the horizon, endless. The thing I miss most is color. There’s no color. It’s a black and white world, and to go out into it, I need three layers, top and bottom. The last few days the moon has been so bright—effervescent—like a spotlight reflecting off the snow, so bright I check to see if the lights are still on outside the house. I wanted to take photographs for all of you, but I couldn’t bring myself to put on the layers. It was just too much.

I feel exhausted, all the time. And I’m doing all the right things. Taking Vitamin D. Eating oranges and lettuce, whatever produce was grown in places where human beings are actually designed to live and shipped in on the bones of dinosaurs.

Well, I’m not doing all of the right things. As I write, it’s 1:55 in the morning, which means if I were to use my sun lamp when I am meant to, as according to the almighty internet and cet.org, at 7:45 in the morning, that would give me less than six hours of sleep. Less than I got in college, most nights.

So I’m staying up too late, and I can’t drag myself out of bed, and I’m sleeping through those precious morning hours of daylight, the only real daylight I get here. I feel like I’m coping, but just barely. Treading water. It feels like a genuine hibernation—all of my essential processes are functioning, at their minimum possible levels—and I’ll only really come alive in the spring, which is so, so far away. I keep remembering the snow we got on April Fool’s Day last year, and I think really? That long? Our frost date is May 20. Only three months to go, guys!

Meanwhile, my magazines are sending me photographs of tulips and forsythia. I’ll be lucky if I get tulips and forsythia in August. Is it worth it? I feel like I’m complaining all the time. I don’t want to complain. I want to be bigger than the weather, to not let it affect me. But what if I’m not?