From Reader Joe Donuts (probably a pseudonym):
“Your wallpaper got me pondering as do many of your posts about what used to be Great Britain. I spent most of my 20 plus years in Uncle Sam’s Traveling Air Circus stationed in East Anglia. Miss it terribly and shudder at what it, and the rest of Europe, has become.
“Fall left here last week. The snow has been on the ground since Monday and is here to stay until late April. I’ve woken to single digit temps the last day or two; they’ll have a negative sign soon enough. Call me odd, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Nor would I. Possibly the strangest thing is that as much as I wouldn’t live pretty much anywhere in the North that I used to (Chicago, New Jersey etc.), I do miss the seasons thereof.
I loved the spring: the way that one day it’s brown and ugly after the snow has melted, and a week later the trees are in full bloom and the grass has somehow recovered after being buried in snow for a few months and is now green again; the joy of a warm, occasionally-hot summer when it feels good to be outside and life just seems more worth living after the February-April dreariness; of the fall, where the trees change from uniform green into a kaleidoscope of many colors and the sweaty heat of summer is replaced with cooler temperatures; and finally, that first snowfall, the beauty of the white covering over everything and the incredible hush that falls after the snow has fallen…
I miss it all, terribly.
And yes, I know that raking the leaves is a pain in the ass, that shoveling snow every morning at 6am in sub-freezing temperatures can become tiresome, and that after the snow has more or less melted away in the late winter/early spring that everything looks dirty and ugly.
As the man said: “Show me paradise and I’ll buy us the tickets.”