Old Man Winter Cometh
Aaron Sharp | January 21, 2021
This column originally appeared in the Odessa American newspaper January 21, 2018. It appears here by permission of the newspaper. The text of this column appears as it originally did 3 years ago, but I have taken the liberty of adding some clarifications.
I don’t like cold weather. I’d take 102 degrees over 22 degrees any day.
This is one of the issues which my wife and I see differently. Where I disdain the cold, my lovely wife regards the coming of winter with delight. Many times over the years she has explained to me her philosophy, “In summer there are only so many clothes you can take off, but in winter you can always put on more. And you get to wear cute scarves, hats, and gloves.”
I remain unconvinced by her argument.
Indeed, my dislike for frigid temps has grown into outright hatred since I became a father. Cold weather makes even the simplest of tasks even more complicated, and if there is one thing that raising four small humans does not need it is another layer of complication.
In the summer we put everyone in shorts and t-shirts and we all go get in the car. We sweat a little bit getting buckled in, but soon enough the air conditioning is blasting. Aside from the occasional buckle turned into molten lava by the Texas sun, things are pretty simple.
In winter we spend copious amounts of time bundling everyone up. Sweatshirts, coats, caps, ear muffs, gloves, mittens, and scarves are all donned in preparation. (This assumes that the hours we spent searching for the myriad of inevitably lost items in that list were not in vain). We open the front door and sprint to the van. Once arriving at the van we begin the process of unbundling everyone so that they can buckle up in their car seats. For some reason the four-year-old Ballerina seems to forget, despite how cold it is, exactly what she is supposed to be doing in her car seat until you remind/beg/plead with her to buckle up approximately a dozen times. Meanwhile, the two-year-old Fashionista is either standing on her head or trying to climb over her seat to get to a cracker or toy in the back of the van. Finally, after something resembling calf-roping she is in her seat and buckled. Mercifully, just before frostbite settles in, I am able to close the van doors and climb into my nice, warm seat. Once we arrive at our destination we open the van doors and once again bundle every one up so that can go inside, unbundle, and lose all of our winter items again.
The whole thing is exhausting, and if I lived somewhere where it got cold and stayed that way for a few months, I’m pretty sure I would have succumbed to hypothermia by now. Either that or I’d just refuse to leave the house until May. Thankfully, we live in the great state of Texas where the weather just wildly fluctuates between a balmy 74 degrees, and a wind chill of 5.
The only upside is that after a couple more years of parenthood my wife might actually agree with me about Old Man Winter.
UPDATE: Three years later and she still does not agree with me. This is a distubing trend in our marraige.