"Safety in Popsicles"

I love winter for ninety-eleven reasons:

1) When I wear snowshoes, my size 10 hooves actually feel petite in comparison. This is also why I sometimes sport a pair of huge "We're #1" foam hands when I teach sign language.

2) Scarves are the accessory that can never go wrong. I read this in Isadora Duncan's biography.

3) Cold temperatures create a perfect excuse to stomp inside and sip on a hot cup of cocoa...or, better yet, to bypass the cocoa and simply pour Kahlua into a mug.

Frankly, I bypass the mug and pour the booze directly into my gaping maw.

Oh, all right. I bypass the Kahlua and chug Isopropyl, Kitty Dukakis style. She, too, loved a good snowball fight--before the rubbing-alcohol-induced blindness set in. At least we now have an excuse for "throwing like girls."

4) If I view my reflection in a piece of ice, my crow's feet are hardly discernible. Frozen water mirrors are hella cheaper than laser surgery.

5) When I pour juice into a cup of snow, I am catapulted back in time to age six at the Yellowstone County Fair, to a day when I had a really kickarse snowcone. Fortunately, with my homemade snowcone, eaten far away from the 4-H cow barns, I don't even have to cry when I trip and drop it. I just dive to all fours and start lapping.

Pride and snowcones are poor bedfellows.

6) When I go cross-country skiing, my vocal chords get a much-needed limbering up; you better believe I'm a screamer on them hills. Post-ski, my throat thoroughly warmed, I'm ready to come home, spin a disc, and hit all Mariah Carey's high notes.

Incidentally, if I ever do willingly remain in the presence of a Mariah Carey song, please grab an ice pick and stab it into my frosty white buttocks. Then do it some more.

7) Ice skates = the poor man's Ginsu knife. Many a loaf of foccacia has regretted my triple lutz.

8) Before the cold really hits, when local ice is still in its infancy, having Niblet sit on a lakeside cliff and tush-sled downwards is a tad worrisome. However, once a solid, fierce coldsnap hits and holds, his airborn descent is no longer given final punctuation by a "splash"


but, rather, after a silent Wile E. Coyote moment of hovering mid-air between cliff and lake, our lad hits the frozen ice mattress of Lake Superior with a dull "thud."

What a relief that he won't drown.


(look at this patsy priss-priss of a lake way back in November; it's all "Oooh, look at my freely-churning waves." But no more, friend. No more. Slowly, gradually, the little flirt is hardening into a surface reminiscent of Nicole Kidman's forehead, capable of no natural movement.)

Way to go, Winter.