This winter truly has been a season of discontent, the most difficult in years. Obviously, one can interpret that sentence in multiple ways, but today my focus is on the weather.
For kicks I looked back at my past February posts to figure out when was the last time I bellyached about the cold and the ice so incessantly. Bingo! It was 2018, when I wrote the below post.
Just like this year, the cold that winter was relentless. It never warmed up enough to melt the snowpack. Ice underfoot threatened to turn every walk into an Emergency Room visit.
Eight years later most cars come with heated seats, but otherwise, the below post feels evergreen. Our dear Barbara Ross still escapes to Key West while most of us remain here, gutting it out in the tundra.
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FEBRUARY, 2018: Last month my esteemed colleague Barbara Ross wrote a “what were we thinking?” post about moving her primary home winter from Somerville, Massachusetts to Portland. It started out like this:
Move to Maine they said.
It’s not as cold and snowy as you think, they said.
The ocean mitigates the temperature on the coast, they said.
To which I say, “HA!”
A bunch of us commented, all along the lines of “Oh, Barb, it’s not that bad.”
But as anyone who has been here knows, the weather these past few months has been pretty awful.
The driving has not been easy
Winter started early. Christmas week was marked by bad weather, including a nasty ice storm that had everyone fretting about family members who were traveling in the days around the holiday.
Then the deep freeze set in, a sustained spell of bitter, painful cold that sucked fuel out of tanks, induced car batteries to die and forced us all to bundle ourselves in six layers of clothing before stepping outside.
A typical reading on the thermometer on our porch those two hellish weeks after Christmas
Stuff inside the spare refrigerator in our garage froze, memorably several cans of ginger ale, which exploded like little soda grenades.
It was grim, but we survived it, and now we’re in the first week of February, so things are looking up. I’m writing this on Superbowl Sunday. It’s gray out there, and spitting snow. But if the sun were visible, we would have first seen it at 6:53 a.m. If skies were to clear today (they won’t, I’m using my writer’s imagination here), sunset would occur at 4:58 p.m. This translates to ten hours of daylight, up from slightly less than nine hours at the solstice, and 11 (count ‘em) hours of visible light.
It’s enough to make a woman’s heart sing.
Here comes the sun
But the point of this column is not to say Barb is right, though truth be told, she is right about many, many things. But she’s not wrong either, not exactly. She’s simply unaware of the many joys of winter in Maine, and I know she’s looking forward to experiencing them some day. For example:
There’s no need to spend money on fancy balance classes like Tai Chi when you have a front walk of your own on which to practice balance and mindful motion. The end of January ice was a gift from Mother Nature in this regard, though I prefer the gift of grippers to keep me upright and my limbs and joints intact.
Can’t get through a Maine winter without these babies
All the little joys of life that you miss in the rush of summer are front and center. The pleasure of a finding a mitten you thought you’d lost. Sure, it’s frozen to the driveway, but at least not gone forever.
The ecstasy of the car wash on one of the few-and-far-between warmish days, scouring the salt off not just the car’s exterior, but the filthy floor mats as well.
And the bottom-warming bliss of a car with heated seats, which makes the drive to work a high point of the day.
You can have the table of your choice at some of Portland’s hottest restaurants on Portland’s coldest nights. The summer lines out the door are a distant memory when the mercury is below zero. The staff is delighted to see you, and, you know, reservations, schmezervations.
But for me, the best thing about the cold weather months is having the beach to ourselves.
Slush on the water
Barb might be strolling the soft sand in Key West right now, but I’m getting ready to put on my big boots and cruise the slushy verge where the ocean meets the Maine shoreline, to feel the wind bite my ears through my hat, and savor the relief of hiking back to the car. The one with the heated seats.
Brenda Buchanan sets her novels and short stories in Maine. Her three-book Joe Gale series features a contemporary newspaper reporter with old-school style who covers the courts and crime beat at the fictional Portland Daily Chronicle. Brenda’s short story, “Means, Motive, and Opportunity,” was in the anthology Bloodroot: Best New England Crime Stories 2021 and received an honorable mention in Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022. Her story Assumptions Can Get You Killed appears in Wolfsbane: Best New England Crime Stories 2023 and her newest, “Cape Jewell,” was published in the 2025 edition of the same anthology, Snakeberry. For more about Brenda go to https://www.brendabuchananwrites.com/
As I write this, I’m hip-deep in edits for No Return, my first novel set in Maine. Wash, rinse, repeat. Yes, that book. Last July I took a deep breath and submitted the novel to several small presses. It was roundly rejected. Almost. One editor kindly responded that they were taking a pass–now. She suggested that the book, written in close third, wasn’t keeping with their editorial style and invited me to edit and resubmit. I popped the cork of the chilled champagne and set to work. Note to future writers. Grow the skin of a hippopotamus and celebrate every victory, even if you have to claw the cover off that cloud to get to the silver lining.
The good news is that I’m satisfied with the story. The edits are more cosmetic than substantive. I’m two weeks from the deadline, and on track. I’m going to miss it when it’s out of my hands again. Updates will follow. Now, back to Kent 4.
—that you can see what needs to be told, what detail will make your readers see.
