Essays and Etcetera

The snow is falling thick and fast outside my window, and the weather report says we could end up with a total of nearly two feet. With this as the atmosphere, I sit down to write about winter.

Winter is like a friend. Not so, you say? True, sometimes it is very easy to think of winter as The Enemy, but it is a friend.

Winter is not your typical friend, don’t get me wrong. It isn’t that light and airy friend, that friend which is all sunshine, and butterflies. (That would be summer.) Winter is not that friend which always makes you smile, or laugh, that friend which always gives you a good time. Winter is not always fun, or easy. Winter is like those difficult friends. Those friends which require so much, but when it is all said and done have given you a lot.

The season is a temperamental friend. One day the sun is shining brightly from a clear blue sky, warming the bare branches of the trees. The next day snow is pouring down, heaping in drifts, as the wind howls. It can be hard to get through those days. Then you turn around and the sun is shining again, only now the world is more beautiful with everything blanketed in crystal snow.

But mostly the sun isn’t shining. Winter is that moody, dark, friend, who you suffer with. Winter is severe, not easygoing. The months are full of those days were the darkness comes early, and leaves late.

Winter is the kind of friend that makes you think. It makes you think about how slippery the roads might be, or how unpleasant it is to feel cold. But you also end up thinking about the rest of the year, the other seasons. On those cold and dark days, you think about what you like, and why. You think about the year, about life, and how things come and go.

This is the best thing about winter: it is like a friend that gives you perspective on life. It is like a friend that is difficult, but in being difficult improves your own character. If we didn’t have winter around, what would we be like? Would we appreciate the other seasons as much? Would we have eyes that see so clearly all the good things? Without winter we would we grow aesthetically lazy, taking all the beautiful things–the green growing plants, the beautiful flowers, the sweet breeze, and the warm sun–for granted.

A difficult friend can sometimes teach us more than all of our sweet easy friends combined. The difficult friend can be very important in our lives.

And yet, still, we can’t help feeling glad when they’re gone.