Ode to Cold

Do you know what it's like to WANT to be cold? To wish you could stagger around in flurries of snow that fill every nook and cranny of your eskimo outfit?
First you start with boots so big and heavy that they make you walk like a 400 pound man. Inside there are a few extra pairs of socks you stole from your dad. On your legs are long underwear, heavy jeans, and snow pants that make that zipzip sound when you walk. These are what make falling over into the snow feel like tumbling into a cloud in snow motion. On top is your brightly colored ski jacket (because they only wear black in New York and white is just silly, for many reasons). A pair of gloves, then mittens on top of those, a thick hat down around your ears, your hood pulled up tight, and a long scarf wrapped around that, keeping it all in place.
After being outside for a while, your breath will make a sheet of ice form on the inside of your scarf. You rotate the scarf, forming a sheet on the other side as well. Eventually this ice will chafe and chap the entire lower portion of your face.
Your feet will get cold. They always get cold, no matter how many pairs of socks or how expensive your ice-fishing boots are. But you wiggle your toes and feel them rubbing against each other like blocks of wood and know they will be okay for a little while longer.
As you stagger across fields of untouched, unseen, unbroken snow, you have to lift each foot as high as you can to take the next step. If you have layered your clothes properly, no snow will get in your boots. Snow whips across the field, lifting and twisting, looking like white sheets flapping in the wind on a clothesline. And when you find somewhere to hunker down, in a hollow under a pine tree, or between two small hills, you'll feel colder, somehow, but safer than you ever have in your life.
I remember when we were little my brother and I used to crawl under the one tree on the bus stop corner. Trees, no matter how much snow there is, always have that tiny clear space just around their trunks. We would huddle together there to be out of the wind and then emerge in an explosion of snow like awakened bear cubs when the bus pulled up.
When I was a teenager, I would heat my car until I could strip off my jacket inside, and somehow this felt more dangerous than they way we would all expertly slide through stop signs.
It's wishing your lungs would burn until they hurt while sledding, the way your cheeks turn an impossible red, how your hands will never get warm once your gloves are wet, and the fact that the harder it snows and the darker it gets, the harder it gets to resist going outside into it.
That is what it's like to miss the cold.