The winter I hate is grey

I have a ridiculously hard time picking favorites out of things, so I’ve always found it kind of surprising that I could immediately announce that my least favorite season was winter. To the point that I couldn’t understand why anyone would like anything about winter, ever.

And while the winter season is something I’ve always just kind of endured, I realized I don’t have any particularly bad connections to the winter. There was never a really cold or hungry winter, for example, or even really an emotionally terrible winter that I can think of off hand.

Today wasn’t particularly cold, all things considered. Yes, it was chilly, and I wore The Longest Socks Ever, and I was sometimes uncomfortable. But the worst thing about this afternoon was the grey.

I identify grey-chilly-rainy-shitty with winter so much that months ago, when we had my first real true mudstain-grey day in Japan, where we didn’t see the sun at all, and you could never tell what time it was, I thought “this is like winter, to me.” Calling it cold that day would have been a long shot. I chalked it up to the fact that maybe in Georgia it is never cold. This is merely a myth, but you start to wonder if it’s true when you begin to see the way November ends in the mountains of inaka Japan.

And I realized that “This [grey rainy chill] is like winter,” and “I hate winter,” amounts to an actual statement of “I hate the grey of winter.”

I guess after this winter I may also hate the cold of winter, but last year in Kansas it wasn’t so much a problem. Partly because my poorly insulated apartment DID have SOME insulation, partly because there were random 70-degree days in the middle of like December or January or what the hell… Japan seems too true to season to pull a stunt like that, so I figure when it’s winter for real, it’ll be winter for real the whole time it’s winter.

Also, my house smells like kerosene. Probably because I spilled a bunch of it on the floor. I swear, sometimes I don’t know how I do it. I make stupid mistakes, rookie mistakes, even after being warned against them. I was told how to do this properly. I just can’t do more than one thing at a time, maybe? At least not properly.

Even if the winter I hate is grey, and that winter is coming soon, I still feel pretty good about where I am and what I’m doing. For today, that is enough.

I’m also excited that in one month, I’ll be in the States for a visit!