Shoveling Snow

 There is something about shoveling snow that makes men into boys again. Maybe it is the eerie quiet of a muffled world that takes on back to a simpler time. Maybe it is just the fact you are doing something you did as a kid. But really there is more to it than that. Shoveling snow is innocence unleashed. Shoveling snow is very American  .Powdery heaping pearls of white stuff that you throw over your shoulder. The snow makes the world into a winter wonderland and you cannot help but go back to a time when you believed in everything.

For me it is coming to the Midwest for the first time and seeing all that snow heaped against our house and drifting in from the plains. The Chicago winters were different from the Baltimorean winters I was used too. We had snow but never in the amounts the Midwest generated and we did not have that other worldly cold. And so I was sent out in the early morning or the afternoon to shovel the snow in the great silence

And there is something Godlike about the snow. You stand in it and pause and stare off across the land. I can see a farmers silo in the distance and a neighbors house that looks like something out of Hansel and Gretel. And still there is something else. Maybe it is laboring in the clear cold air that makes one feel very young again. Maybe it is that connection of snow and Christmas. Maybe it is just that for a moment you can hear the world sigh when you stop with that blood coursing through your veins and the wind waters your eyes and you stare across the frozen white land and you mutter to yourself....

God, I love this.

www.billhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man...the American Dream Upside Down
 

Cabin Fever

I get it why Hemingway lived in Key West and then Cuba. I mean I really get it watching the snow swirling outside my window in the middle of April. Cabin Fever. This is when it is the worse. You have done your time. You have suffered through the sub zero days and the snow and you have trudged through gale force bone cracking wind and now it is April and you should be rewarded for living in the Midwest and going through weeks without sunshine and days so dark and cold you feel like slitting your wrist. But NOOOOO. It's snowing and its raining and the sun wont be back for a week. Cabin fever hits you like a dark night.

The real thing that gets you is going to Florida. You come back and your first question off the plane is: How stupid am I? And you answer it quickly. REALLY STUPID. Why would you live in a place where basically people spend seven to eight months indoors and then run outside like hysterical lepers at the first sign of sun only to get rained on or snowed on or blown away in a tornado. In Florida you get up and go for a run and sit on the beach and yeah it's full of retired people and everyone is transplants and the alligators and swamps are a little weird, but WHO CARES! It's beautiful man and you are not stuck in doors.

And yeah when you get older you come to realize that the Midwest is where all the coalminers live. People work in the Midwest. And then they work some more. And then they work some more. Then they get old and die. GREAT. It's not as bad as all that but it's close. Just ride the Metra in the dead of winter with all the commuters and it looks like something out Russia with everyone trudging toward the Gulag. And then you to this place where it is sunny every day. Nobody seems to work. Cars don't rust. You wear shorts and eat seafood. And the ocean is there just for you.

But that is not where you live. You live in the Chicago land area. Everyone does work including you. And you cannot figure out how to escape. So you wait. You wait with everyone else. You wait for the sun and grit it out until...June, maybe July...August?

www.billhazelgrove.com

Rocket Man will blast off in July