Seriously. Just Take Your Stuff and Go.

It’s Saturday. The kitties are mewling pitifully for cream (despite the fact that they rarely if ever chip in for groceries), my bed still hasn’t made itself, and the temperature has plummeted here in Minneapolis a good 20 degrees from yesterday.

And why not? It’s January, still, and no one said this was going to be easy.

Oh, sure, there was talk early on about how lovely it is to have four seasons, how pretty the snow is and how childishly excited we’ll be once we’re able to do something as novel as wear shoes outside rather than boots; but the thrill is gone, people.

I’m breaking up with winter.

In the beginning, and I do mean in the beginning, when I was a young, tender thing with proper hand/feet blood circulation and dreams of graceful ice-skate-driven pirouettes, it was good between us. Winter added a pinkness to my cheeks, and I was grateful. It’s hard being of a naturally yellowish hue, and I was tired of being asked if I was “okay”. Stop asking me that! I’m fine! I’m just yellow-y, okay?

Sheesh. Give a girl a break.

But then came high school; and the young, tender things with money were going skiing, so I saved my money so that I could go, too. Pity I didn’t know how to ski, though, and my reward for ridiculous amounts of babysitting and acting like I knew what I was doing earned me a face-plant into the side of a mountain (or maybe it was a hill – it is Minnesota, after all) and my own key to the high school elevator for a month.

That’ll teach ya!

That was the beginning of the end; and in all this time, winter has failed to make it up to me.

Lost mittens and hats, frostbite, falling on the ice? Dead car batteries? Fruitless searches for jumper cables? The gradual accumulation of turtlenecks and superfluous hip and buttock padding?

All winter’s fault.

So, yeah. It’s over, and I don’t feel bad about it.

Winter can leave my unfrozen toes and fingers at the front door on its way out.