Wandering In the Dark

In high school, when I briefly flirted with the idea of attending a small liberal arts school in Wisconsin, my father practically begged me to reconsider. Not because it was a known party school, not because the tuition was enough to feed a small third-world country for a day, not because the words "small and liberal arts" were used in the same sentence, not because I would be moving thousands of miles away to a land inhabited by roughly as many cows and bars as people. No, all of those would have been a sure fire way to get me to flee gaily to the cheesehead capitol and stay there whether I liked it or not, just to prove a point. Rather, he practically begged me to reconsider my musings because it SNOWED there. (To be fair, I'm sure the other reasons crossed his mind several dozen times, but he knew me well enough to deter me with my weakness rather than with his worst nightmares come true).

It's a well known fact that I hate winter. Unfortunately, Himself hates to be hot, so we're trapped in the middle horizontal third of the country where the summers are hot (hoorah) and the winters are frigid (you can see Himself hoisting his skis and singing praises at each new patch of snow that shows up on the mountains).

However, it isn't the snow or the cold or the scraping of one's windows that I hate as much as the lack of light. It is nearly physically impossible for me to function without daylight. Artificial light doesn't cut it. I crave real, honest-to-goodness sunshine.

For this reason, I loathe the week before Daylight Savings ends and winter officially begins (regardless of what nature says, winter begins when it is dark when you get up and dark when you get home). I left my house this morning at 6:34 a.m. to wander around in the pitch blackness that only winter can bring as Day 2 of Operation Fitness commenced. Unlike Virginia, where everyone is halfway into their 2-hour commute at 6:30 a.m., no one is actually up and out at that hour in The Frontier, this close to the city.

I wandered around in the dark for 45 minutes. I passed three people and maybe four times that many cars. It felt as if I was exercising at 3 a.m. rather than the more-than-sensible 6:30 a.m.

The entire time (while praying I wasn't going to be hit by a car or incapacitated by the uneven terrain caused by sidewalks that appear and disappear at random in my enighborhood) I contemplated how I could hibernate through winter or move to the southern hemisphere where it is now spring. No longer is my dream of being a snowbird and owning two houses good enough - now I want those houses to be in two different hemispheres so I don't have to deal with dark mornings and cold days any more.

Seriously, in the days of telecommuting, wireless Internet and automatic deposit, would it be so wrong for me to consider apartment hunting in, say, a small beachside town in South America?