A wise man once said, “Winter is coming.”
As I stepped outside on Saturday morning, a feeling of dread hung over me. As I had feared, the air had a crisp sharpness to it, despite the threat of rain. Grey clouds rolled overhead and the wind whipped up leaves that had fallen in the night. I stepped back inside to grab a light jacket, a painful action that admitted that all the signs were there. It was the beginning of the end, a premonition of worse to come.
I don’t dislike fall. In fact, in terms of seasons, I generally enjoy it. The weather is usually fairly nice, with enough warm days mixed in with the cooler ones to still feel comfortable while doing outdoor activities. There’s campfires and caramel apples and playoff baseball. It’s no summer, but there is just a general cozy feeling to it that other seasons lack, one that asks you to sit by a window and read a good book or turn on a Packer game on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Overall, not bad, and in many regards, quite good.
What I don’t like, however, is that foreboding feeling that each day could be the last. At some point, as the days grow shorter and the temperatures continue to drift downward, one day will be the end. The final truly nice day of the year, where you can still feel the warmth of the sun on your skin, where a light breeze carries with it not a chilling bite but a gentle, mellow caress. A day that will likely seem ordinary at the time, but in several weeks time, I will look back upon it with a wistful nostalgia as I try my best not to freeze to death.
Because, unfortunately, as much as I enjoy autumn, it is also a harbinger of the season to follow. That cold, wet, dreary Saturday morning was a reminder that the remaining days of summer are numbered.
Winter is not far off. It is an unfortunate fact of life in Wisconsin. For over half the year, those who live here are subjected to temperatures and weather patterns that are wholly unconducive to continued human survival. And yet, every year, it returns, and we just accept the truly sad state of affairs. Some have even tricked themselves into believing that they actually like the fact that freezing cold blizzards come through and sap the life from the world around them.
I, for one, am not one of those people. Personally, my favorite part of winter is that, while the outside world is rendered inhospitable for your average human being, this also means that said world is also equally inhospitable to a host of nasty creepy crawlies over a certain size, which I can certainly appreciate. Other than that, however, the merits of winter are few and far between.
With that being said, I feel that there is some room for improvement here. And I understand that I’m pretty low on the totem pole in terms of deciding which seasons get to exist and which ones don’t, but I would still like to humbly suggest that winter’s overall role be reevaluated.
Now, I’m not saying that it should be done away with entirely (as I said before, the lack of dinner plate sized spiders is a definite plus), but perhaps some of its current workload could be distributed between summer and fall? After all, five to seven months of winter seems a bit on the excessive side. Surely dinner plate sized spiders could live a maximum of several weeks in such conditions, so the need to extend the season much beyond that time frame seems frankly unnecessary. And I suppose it’s fair to give those who’ve deluded themselves into thinking solid water is a fun and natural state for the substance to exist a couple days to enjoy such things, but honestly I think feeding those delusions any more than necessary is just unhealthy.
And look, I get it. Obviously there’d be the small issue of completely destabilizing the entire ecosystem and whatnot, but come on, it’s not like it hasn’t happened before, right? Sure, there are a lot less dinosaurs and woolly mammoths roaming around now, but it all kind of turned out okay, more or less.
Just imagine how wonderful fall would be without the growing apprehension of what is to follow. One could enjoy all the great things it has to offer without also thinking about the fact that they only exist to bring about a half a year of bitter cold.
Unfortunately, I fear that this petition will merely fall on deaf ears. The powers that be have yet to consider my offer seriously, and as such, I’m left to hopelessly watch as summer days fade into winter nights. As some random Game of Thrones character once said, “Winter is coming.”
And at least ours doesn’t come with an army of frozen zombies, so there’s that.
A C ertain Point of V iew
eporter
