An Ode to Cold
Low temps aren’t the whole landscape.
Ava Jax
We finally have a real Minnesota winter. After last winter’s blech beige nothing and the previous year’s copious but fleeting blizzards, the current cold has gotten people chiming in about the wind chill and reminding folks to wear gloves. My summer-loving friends long for the break of spring: to leave the house without jackets and without their toes numbing in canvas sneakers, which, for sure, under no circumstances, should have been worn out of the house.
However, I must admit—I become a certain type of alive at 1 a.m., standing here, filling my gas tank because the record-low, subzero temps would otherwise freeze it. It’s not necessarily the adrenaline-pumping, survival-based ‘alive,’ but awareness of warmth that does exist between the icicles and choppy gusts of air. Let me explain. I recognize that for many, many people, celebrating the cold sounds freakish, and I won’t attempt to convince anyone otherwise. As a native Minnesotan, born with a hockey pond in my backyard and cold press in my mittens, I know this experience isn’t universal. But if you surrender to the polar vortex for a second, there may be something worth taking away.
To wildly misquote a poem, the merciless aspects of winter do not come “from the cold without” but rather “from the cold within” (1). I’m sure you know the difference between experiencing an external cold and feeling cold to your core. It’s the difference between running from the car to the front porch and sitting in wet clothes for hours. Usually, when you’re faced with just an external cold, your circulation is still grooving and your metabolism is pumping, maybe with the exception of fingers and exposed skin. Spiritually, this type of cold can be kept at bay: recognition of discomfort without overwhelming anguish.
An internal cold is famously hard to shake. Sometimes I can feel my heart beating slower, but there’s always some frigid, bodily reverberation. This past summer, building a greenhouse in the rain, I experienced this. The sunflower oil soaked through the gloves, dripped down my arms, and no amount of tea in warm mugs could help. My tongue would burn and yet bring no warmth to my stomach. This type of cold feels inescapable, as if working on a cellular level.
This past weekend, I walked home from a friend’s party, cold. Street lamps lit the snow blowing sideways, and the sidewalk ice had compacted, and hardened. And I’ll say it: the friends I made along the way left my heart held over a hearth, keeping my spirit warm. These distinctions between physical, mental, and emotional warmth started to melt together. Now, I will never deny the necessity for warmth, particularly for those at all deprived of it. There’s an unavoidable hostility to a lack of warmth—that’s not what this is about—but I don’t think cold and lack of warmth mean the same thing. It feels like too often cold is conflated with torment, and warmth with comfort. But the cold contains multitudes: histories of community and light and celebration, values of grit and reflection. In winter, the sound is dampened, nature slows down, and so maybe we can find the cold less internally scathing if we surrender to this mode of being.
Cold reminds the nervous system that the only thing that doesn’t change is change, and that this too shall pass. There’s a joy in the contrast, in feeling your body get heavier, slower, and, in some ways, sadder. But with our political climate, there’s solace in a state “where sadness makes sense” (2).
With this sentiment of temporality, and acquaintance with Minnesotan culture, I find an unshakeable warmth from shoveling the porch, lending out gloves, letting the quiet night hold fast to my cheeks. Frozen waters run deep. If you look, these are just reflections. And so, for now, I find it important to see that there is warmth found in our days of less sunlight and slippery ground. But probably out of the wind.
The Cold Within, James Patrick Kinney
i’m going back to minnesota where sadness makes sense, Danez Smith