Seasoning

This week "My Wife Asks..." 

Summer, Fall, Spring, or Winter: Pick one season and tell us why.

For the first half of my life, the answer would have been Winter, hands down.  During that time, the main draw of winter was the snow.  I loved skiing.  I loved sledding behind my dad's motorcycle.  I loved building snowmen.  I loved building snow forts and throwing snowballs.  I loved eating handfuls of snow and writing my name in the snow.  I loved staying home from school because of a snow day.  I loved pulling the emergency brake and cranking the steering wheel for a perfectly executed "Batman" in a snow/ice covered parking lot.  Heck, I even loved shoveling sidewalks, since back then, a cleared sidewalk equaled money in my pocket. 

For the first half of my life, I experienced winter only as the holiday season.  Winter meant Christmas presents, Christmas decorations, Christmas lights and trees, Christmas dinner, and Christmas vacation.  What's not to love?

But over the past dozen plus years, I have experienced winter as the season of work.  I no longer get the luxury of experiencing everything great winter has to offer, I actually have to work for winter.  Winter now means scraping ice off a windshield, shoveling a sidewalk and a driveway, and applying proper brake pressure when trying to slow down my passenger vehicle so as to not lose traction with the road.  Winter now costs money:  snow tires, coats and gloves, shovels and snowblowers and sledding equipment all cost money from my pocket. 

Winter now takes planning.  What's the best route home so I don't get my car stuck in the snow?  What presents am I going to buy?  At what speed can I ski that will be slow enough to prevent personal injury, yet fast enough to not be considered an old man by my sister?  Do we get a real or fake Christmas tree?  Or do we forgo a tree all together since it takes so much care and maintenance to ensure the tree doesn't create a fire hazard?  Do we save up all of our vacation time for a long Christmas break or split it up throughout the year? 

Finally, as a younger man, I would relish the cold of winter.  Not any longer.  You may remember a winter poem I published on this very blog a few months ago.  It went something like this:

WINTER

By Abigail Elizabeth McIntyre

 

Shit it's Cold.

The End

Truer words were never spoken.  So, all of these factors have contributed to the waning of my love of winter.  But, I believe I would still love winter, despite these new nuisances, were it not for one word:  GOLF.

 

Winter makes it really difficult to golf, especially in Omaha.  So, I would say that at this time, I prefer spring, summer, and fall, or as I like to call them -- Golf Season.

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SONG:  "I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)" by Meat Loaf.

 

Today, as I was eating a lunch of leftover spaghetti and meatballs, I started pondering which I preferred more: meatballs or meatloaf.  Which made me think of the singer Meat Loaf.  To which I wrote the following Tweet:   

Can't decide which I like more: meatloaf (the food, not the singer) or meatballs (the food, not the movie).

Which I then modified a bit to come up with the following Facebook status:

Can't decide which I like more:  meatloaf (the food, not the singer famous for the "Bat out of Hell" trilogy of albums) or meatballs (the food, not the 1979 movie directed by Ivan Reitman and staring Bill Murray).  Discuss.

Which then reminded me that I should see if any Meat Loaf songs are worth buying since my sister sent me an Amazon gift card that I wanted to use to buy new music.  The "I Will Do Anything For Love" song was my favorite, especially for the overriding riddle of what in fact it was that Mr. Loaf wouldn't do for love.