Requiem for New York City winter

March 20, the first day of spring has officially arrived, and even if the artificial construction of the calendar didn’t announce it, you can feel things changing on the streets of New York City. The temperature is finally consistently above the 30s, and leaving home no longer requires carefully checking to make sure you have all a hat, gloves, scarf, and at certain scary moments, thermal underwear. I have lived in a variety of different climates, and my favorite weather pattern remains the northeastern United States. Around here, there are four distinct seasons, and before you get to enjoy nice weather, winter kicks your ass. By the end of it, you are weakened and sick of it. Yet, just when it seems bleakest and you want to scream, the days get longer, clothes get shorter, and baseball season starts. Other places I have lived, like Israel and Arkansas, do not have harsh winters. It is precisely because the cold weather hurts so much that spring feels so good.

Along with springs come irrational exuberance. I look online at summer concerts and movie screenings, putting more events in my calendar than I can possibly attend. In that way, spring is a sexy person sitting across from you in an airport terminal.  The fantasies in your mind are greater than the reality, and no matter what transpires between the two of you, nothing can match the fantasies you have crafted before you have even said a word. Spring is hope. Pure, unadulterated hope.

Yet, it’s false hope. Summer rarely matches our fantasies, and before you know it, the leaves start turning color and the cold returns. The poet Philip Larkin highlights this in his poem, “The Trees”. He describes the freshness of “trees coming into leaf again/like something almost being said,” their blossoms telling us to “begin afresh, afresh, afresh”.  But, of course, trees are not eternal. They too die, as “their yearly trick of looking new is written down in rings of grain.” Fundamentally, it’s all illusion.

This is not to say that winter can’t deceive either. It has its own crafty falsity. In 2008, I moved to Philadelphia for graduate school, and after finishing my first year there, I was disheartened I did not love the city. To me, a new city is like a new lover, which is to say I typically fall in love quickly and recklessly. Philly took time though. I was wondering if I would ever learn to feel affection for the place. However, in 2010, the city received two big snow storms within three days, each one dumping over 20 inches of snow on the city. The interstate highway shut down for a few hours, and that never happens. During the second snow storm, I took a walk around the city, and suddenly, magically, I was entranced. I could walk in the streets of this major metropolis, and the silence was palpable. I went to the local park where kids played football in the snow, college kids put a mini-keg in a makeshift igloo, and parents sledded with their kids. The city’s rhythms did not yet have time to blemish the scene, so we were blanketed in crisp, white, unsullied snow. The city seemed so full of promise. It felt like absolution. It reminded me of a kitel, the white garment worn by Jewish men on the high holidays, a visual signifier of the forgiveness God will hopefully grant them for their sins. For the first time, I looked Philadelphia in the eyes, and I could say, “I love you.”

But then, within 24 hours, the snow started to look like shit. It looks great for a brief period, and then there is no way to ignore that the city turns it black and slushy. Even if God absolves us for our transgressions on the Jewish New Year, we surely find a way to start sinning as soon as the day is over.

I appreciate this candour, this frankness. So while winter slowly lingers in its death throes - it did drop a few inches of snow in NYC on the first day of spring - I want to praise it one more time. I won’t mourn arctic winds that force you to walk with your face sideways. Nor will I miss biking in sub-zero temperature and trying (mostly successfully) to gauge what part of the street are covered in black ice. But I’ll miss the season’s integrity. Winter is the latent Puritan that lies within us all, the part of us that recognises flowers and blossoms eventually decay. It’s not that I think that instinct is good. Life is easier if you can maintain the illusions of spring. I just think that instinct is honest. It’s nice to drive a car super fast, but at some point, you need to apply the breaks, turn the engine off, and then run into the house to turn up the heat.