The air was frigid, no, it was crystallized. One of those mornings where the temperature dipped so low it felt as if your breath froze on exhalation, the two atoms of hydrogen to one of oxygen within your body solidified and even simple motion pained your joints.
Of course, the description above could be one of several mornings we have endured thus far this winter - for there have been many cold sunrises - but it relates specifically to the Monday after Schoharie County and the entire region was buried in a foot of snow. Which was immediately followed by a daunting cold front.
For the Editor of this publication, it was bittersweet, as I traded my regular Monday morning routine of attending Professor Pidgeon's Chemistry lecture at SUNY Cobleskill for shoveling a foot of leftover snow in inhumanely cold conditions. Moments that make me reminisce for the perpetual warmth of Fort Benning, Georgia, or even the last streaks of orange in a late August sunset.
But in the midst of those harsh sub-zero, icy temperatures, there was a feeling that is absent from the three other seasons: a sense of purity, or perhaps, a fresh start. For in springtime we witness the birth of the season, while in summer the environment continues to grow and finally in fall, nature retreats to hibernation, and for some, death.
However, winter is different. From its initiation to its conclusion, the season that stretches sometimes from November to April is the very definition of will breaking. It throws snow, frigid temperatures, ice, sub-zero wind chills and everything that results from the wrath of the aforementioned conditions in your daily existence.
It makes or breaks the person and can set the tone for the remaining cycles of life that calendar year. It allows the opportunity to start anew, in conjunction with the New Year falling soon after its annual start, with a clean slate that affords every person the chance to change and prosper... If they can survive its cruelty first.
Cecil B. DeMille's famous narration in The Ten Commandments described Moses' journey across the harsh, dry desert as a tool for the Creator to shape the disgraced Egyptian Prince into his ultimate purpose, the deliverer of his people enslaved in bondage. The harshness of winter can parallel the cruelty of a desert journey, and like Moses, we can all be shaped by its conditions and come out of the fire as not only stronger on the outside, but as a more driven individual from within.
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