8 Ounce

I'm easily accustomed to things. Say you took away my routine - what little routine I have - I would just work around it, create another way to go about my day. Say the ceramic coaster by my computer broke, I'd replace it with the top of a tupperware container. Say the floor was covered in clothes, I'd learn to step lightly on only the dirty ones.

So, naturally, I've become accustomed to mild weather. For as cold as it has been one day there has always been a string of decent days. Well today wasn't one of the decent days, far from it. Campus was an ice sheet, the rain froze to my windshield before the wipers could brush it aside and it was cold. Bitterly cold.

Usually I don't mind my toes being cold. I've never been out in the snow without my toes being cold. It reminds me of waking up late for school, terribly late, and hiding in my bed hoping that the blazing angelic light on the ceiling was from the mirror of ice spread across the woods behind my parent's house. My mom never forgot to wake me up, it was exhilarating to have that sudden fear that she had somehow lapsed on her motherly duties, fear that it was my fault and she had woken me, left for work and I failed to get on the bus, and then to realize that a sudden snowfall had knocked out the bus route up the big hill in front of my neighborhood.

It was cause for celebration and I was never prepared. I didn't watch the news for closings, or worship the word of the weathermen, every time I prayed for a snowday it was jinxed. I wore my pajamas inside out (when I was older and slept naked I actually wore pajamas specifically so that I could put them inside out) but nothing ever came of it. I would do my homework, sometimes hoping that like carrying an umbrella if I was prepared there would be no reason to be prepared, but nothing ever worked and snowdays were, and still are, a completely random indulgence, a gamble I would never make, but was happy to cash in on.

I lacked the religious zeal that most kids had for snowdays, the rituals seemed to work for them while I kept myself out of it. I felt bad to be responsible for the jinxing of all our snowdays so I didn't try. I didn't have a snowsuit on standby, either. Every snowday would send me scrambling through the basement, digging out snow bibs of every size, sometimes I had to settle for one that had suspenders so big they would fall off my shoulders or one from years earlier that rode up in the crotch and made sliding down an icy hill on my butt an even more jarring experience, if you know what I mean. Apparently my mom never got rid of my brother and my old snowsuits, and I always grabbed the wrong size first.

I didn't own "snow" boots, my family hiked, so we had hiking boots. There's a reason mountaineers don't wear leather boots on the glaciers: they are freezing cold, even with a pair or two of thick wooly socks. Your toes get locked into a cave in the end of your boot, the tip of a boot could keep the mud off your toes, but the cold air would leak in just the same. And once you had cold air in your boots it wouldn't come out. It just sat there, fed from the outside as you trudged through the snow, and if the snow was deep enough, and you were carelessness enough, the snow would come up over the top and work its way down into the cave and that meant trouble. Snow in the boot is the number one killer of sledding expeditions. Inevitably someone would get snow in their boots and all was lost, if one valiant sledder had to go home, even on the promise of a quick stop at base camp and a prompt return, it was over. They would never come back and once the team got to thinking about the lost comrade it seemed like hot chocolate was better than getting snow in your boot. But, to the bewilderment of most people, losing a man on Everest never meant you wouldn't try again, in the infinite wisdom of my adolescence the snow would always be there tomorrow. As far as I can remember we only had 2 consecutive snowdays my entire life.

Every snowday came about and went about pretty much this same way. Of course, at the time nothing seemed more natural. It never occurred to me that they were all the same. I mostly needed to go through the woods with my sled, meet Michael half way and try my best to keep from getting hurt while we tried to kill ourselves on a neighbor's hill, getting cold and waiting for snow to get down in my boot so I could go home and drink some hot chocolate. It didn't matter that by the time we were 17 I drove to Mike's house, or that we took along his baby nephew (mostly because the kid had a sled, and ours had vanished over the years) or that we realized walking up the hill wasn't worth the four second ride back down, the snow was never as perfect as it used to be and we were too heavy to glide along and sank down like overweight Yetis on a busted up Snoopy sled. I never thought about it, it never mattered. Instead we might lay out in the snow and talk about school, the strange idea of college, the ass on that girl in the band who sat near Mike or the strange feeling of sweating under the layers when it's cold as hell outside. Snowdays weren't about the mundane, I overlooked their rhythm, the fact that each one was identical to any other. We were out in the snow, in the woods where so much of my childhood was created so quickly, doing nothing. Who cared if snowdays meant today's obligations would collide with tomorrow's commitments? Shit, I had snow in my boot and the only thing that could fix it was hot chocolate.

They closed campus early today, but all of my classes were over anyways. Skating my way to my car the wind blew and all of a sudden I noticed that my feet were freezing cold, it felt like the black burn of frostbite. I can't seem to get them warm and I can't help but notice how cold they are. I wish I could blame the snow in my boots but there seems to be no explanation and I can't help but notice how much it bothers me.