I wore one too few layers on this morning's walk to work at thirty degrees. Eyeing a projected high of fifty, a lighter jacket and baseball cap seemed the right apparel for an Appalachian spring day. Arriving at the O school bleary eyed and chilled to the bone, my stiff fingers are barely able to type these lines. It's a familiar feeling.
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We humans are an inadequately adapted animal for temperate climates. Being bald and warm-blooded, we're unable to regulate winter internal temperatures without outside help. That aid comes in a few major forms - fire and it's many substrates (peat, coal, oil, electricity), caves and their human-made surrogates, and animal skins or facsimiles thereof.
I grew up in Bound Brook, a working class borough in central New Jersey that resisted the movement to school regionalization that had started in the 1960s. Consequently, it was the job of children to get themselves to school in the roughly two-mile square district without buses. Our family did it's best to keep the kids appropriately dressed for the frigid northeast winters. An annual fall trip to Great Eastern Mills saw us selecting the school clothes we liked and our mother putting them back for the cheaper and often thinner versions. Christmas brought a flannel shirt purchased through Green Stamps and perhaps a sweatshirt or coat from an older sibling who worked. As the youngest of seven, my best and most loved bet for winter warmth was the often threadbare hand-me-downs from three older brothers. Still, on the coldest mornings with temperatures in the twenties and windchill well below, it took an hour or two to revive in the heated classroom of LaMonte Elementary School.
I grew up in Bound Brook, a working class borough in central New Jersey that resisted the movement to school regionalization that had started in the 1960s. Consequently, it was the job of children to get themselves to school in the roughly two-mile square district without buses. Our family did it's best to keep the kids appropriately dressed for the frigid northeast winters. An annual fall trip to Great Eastern Mills saw us selecting the school clothes we liked and our mother putting them back for the cheaper and often thinner versions. Christmas brought a flannel shirt purchased through Green Stamps and perhaps a sweatshirt or coat from an older sibling who worked. As the youngest of seven, my best and most loved bet for winter warmth was the often threadbare hand-me-downs from three older brothers. Still, on the coldest mornings with temperatures in the twenties and windchill well below, it took an hour or two to revive in the heated classroom of LaMonte Elementary School.
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It's overused but also really true that what doesn't kill you will make you stronger. Learning to defrost after icy walks to school made me ready to handle the sting of a hard baseball into glove or onto bat in early spring practices. Knowing that frozen fingers would limber up gave me the confidence to catch that opening kickoff and run with the football to start late season games. Amid the current grief from losses in this unusual springtime - livelihoods, lifestyles, even loved ones - it's good to recall that the hands will once again thaw to help make a new world a more sustainable place to eat, work, love, and play.
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