Cold comfort

Yah, it was cold…so what? Life, we would learn, is full of “so whats.”

What a beautiful day dawned yesterday.

Sun drenched. Sky crystal blue. Air like ice wine. A day perfect to the season.

Which, it being winter and all, meant it was cold. Fifteen below cold, give or take a degree or two … but at that point, who’s counting?

Other than the school district, of course.

It’s encouraging to think that our educational authorities were so loath to deprive our young people of the full freedom to experience such a rare and glorious February day that they canceled classes, closed the schools to assure the children would have first-hand memories of a Midwest winter at its finest.

Ahhh, if only it were so…

Truth is, they figured it was too cold for the little darlin’s to venture beyond the family nest. Too risky for the kids to step outside. Too, too dangerous to go out there.

I disrespectfully disagree.

If Og the Caveman could manage an ice age childhood with nothing but mammoth wool long johns and a smoky wood fire, Little Johnny should manage a winter day sheltered by Gortex, goose down, wind-chill warnings, and central heat. Not many things on earth are more predictable than having a cold day in a Minnesota winter. It’s normal weather. Deal with it.

Deal with it like it’s not some sort of natural disaster…’cuz it ain’t.

Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and tornados … those are natural disasters. When there’s six feet of water in the building, yeah, it’s time to close the school. If the roof’s just blown off, there is probably a good reason to cancel class. Having to crank up the thermostat two degrees? Not the same thing.

Oh yeah, we had the occasional unscheduled winter day off when I was of and age to be subject to compulsory public education – after all, you can’t expect kids to walk to school through a mammoth stampede… Seriously, we called ‘em snow days, because they were days when the snow was falling so fast and drifting so high that it would have taken a mammoth stampede to get from town to the isolated farmsteads scattered along the narrow crushed rock roads out in the country. But that didn’t happen often nor did the down time last long. Cows didn’t care what the weather was like, so the milk truck had to get through within a day or so, and if a truck load of milk cans could make it to and from town, a busload of schoolkids could be expected to do the same.

As for the kids living in town – he who hath legs, let him walk.

The idea that we might get a day off simply because it was cold was beyond our imagination. There was heat at home and heat in the school and in between we had hat, parka, mittens, long johns, boots and a scarf – if Eskimos could live in igloos at the North Pole we could surely manage to walk to school in the winter.

And there’d be no sympathy from parents always eager to remind us how much tougher they’d had it than we could ever imagine our lives to be. Why, they’d slept in bedrooms so cold that the water in Grandma’s bedside glass would freeze overnight and she’d have to wait for the ice to melt before she could put her teeth in to have breakfast. Get a ride to school? We were lucky not to have to share a pair of shoes…

Yah, it was cold…so what?

Life, we would learn, is full of “so whats.” Unpleasant stuff. Inconvenient stuff. Difficult stuff. Tragic and terrible stuff. All as unavoidable as a cold day in Minnesota.

So we learned to bundle up, hunker down, head into the wind and keep going. We learned we were stronger, tougher, more resilient than we thought. That we could suffer and survive, then, in spite of pain, difficulty, and distress, do what needs to be done.

A cold day can be a beautiful day, but only if you go out into it, embrace it, learn to deal with it. These are lessons our kids need to learn, and they don’t learn them sitting in their jammies in a Zoom classroom. We can teach them to be afraid or to be prepared, to layer up, get out in the sun, to dare stand up to the cold.

It was a beautiful day. Too bad if they missed it.