Love Notes

by Bill Love

In September, 2000, I was in Auburn, Alabama, where I had served an interim pastorate. It was at the end of a hot summer. I had not seen some of the people there since I had moved a decade earlier. One of them asked me, “Where are you now?”

“I’m in Michigan.” I was serving an interim in East Lansing.

“How do you stand the cold?”

“What do you do in Auburn when it’s 105?” As I knew it had been that summer.

“We go inside.”

“In Michigan, when it’s 10 below, they go inside.”

I have developed the theory that I should live where there is only one brutal season. If you’re going to have winter, have a real winter. One where, when it gets below freezing, it stays there. It’s going back and forth across freezing that wreaks havoc with my sinuses. If it’s going to get cold, get real cold. (Cold enough to kill the bugs, someone told me.) By the time it’s in the teens, most of the humidity is gone, and it really doesn’t feel as cold. Ten below doesn’t feel much different from 10 above, which doesn’t feel as chilly as, say, 25 above. Extended exposure to it will kill you more quickly, but that’s another matter. (When I moved from Michigan to St. Louis in December, 2000, I drove from 18 inches of snow into freezing rain and winter that had two ice storms and a summer that had brutal heat and humidity. All in all, I’d take the snow and a mild summer.)

And people here in Michigan like it. They get excited about things like snowshoes (which is also a verb as in “to go snowshoeing,” which some people refer to as a hobby) and cross country skiing (which you don’t have to go to a resort to do). They have signs that forbid snowmobiles on the sidewalks. It’s actually an issue here. I was taken aback when I heard my first radio commercial advertising a sale on ice-fishing shanties. Not something that comes up much in the South. And golfers like me have months to pine away for the course.

Then there’s “lake effect.” It means more than explaining why Buffalo, New York, gets a bzillion inches of snow every winter.

Here by Lake Michigan, it means living with the constant presence of the lake. And the lake is never still. It constantly exerts its pull. Winter comes more slowly because air masses coming across the lake are warmed by the water which has to cool down from the summer heat. Temperatures are moderated. It’s colder in Wisconsin directly across the lake than it is here. It means we get more snow than they do inland. Twice as much or more than an hour or so drive to the east. And being real winter, it is “dry snow” which is easier to shovel and possible to drive in, not like the wet snow I grew up with in North Carolina. And it’s in the forecast every day. At least it seems so. When there’s a front, you have snow; when there isn’t a front, you have lake effect snow.

Winter without snow cover is a brownish- gray. We have snow cover all winter which brightens the days. We have snow cover in lieu of actual sunshine. Even the nights have a Currier and Ives quality about them.

Murray, my faithful chocolate lab mix, enjoys the brisk air of winter and handles the snow with great aplomb until its depth is greater than the clearance of his undercarriage. He then looks like a 100 pound brown rabbit hopping through the snow. Sometimes he buries his nose in the snow to some scent.

Spring will come more slowly because fronts are cooled until the water warms up from the winter.

Southeast of Lansing is the town of Hell. It does freeze over every winter.

As you read this, you will have had spring or be in the midst of it. In Michigan, Hell will be thawing out, the snow will be melting, and spring will be on its way.

Bill Love is interim senior pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Grand Haven, Michigan.