Once upon a winter...

My last post was all rainbows and smiles and sugar plums. Consider this a fair warning: this will not be one of those posts.

We only lived in GA for 4.5 years. Which means I've lived through 24 winters before we moved, yet somehow I completely forgot about what comes after that first snow. This picture above isn't really from Painesville, it's just symbolic of what all the parking lots look like right now. Aiden can't get over it, he keeps asking me why everything is so dirty and slushy and muddy and gross, lol.

I had also completely forgotten about the salt. Oh the salt. The never-ending salty residue that now lives on every pair of pants I own and is eating away at my new faux-suede boots (in retrospect, a terrible buy). I feel like I can almost taste it in the air, and it's dirty and gritty and just...not my favorite part of winter, lol.

Aiden told me today, when it was particularly windy and particularly cold, "Mom, this winter business is rough!" Somehow, I had blocked it out of my mind. I was glorifying the prettiness of the snow and the fun of winter sports and completely blocked out scraping my windshield and having dirty, salty clothes all winter and forgoing any sense of style in order to just plain stay warm.

But still, I think we do get our reward here. Midwestern summers are something of dreams, where the sun sinks low in the comfortable air with the fireflies darting all around. That is something that I couldn't get over missing when we lived in the south. And while right now I might not be loving winter, it sure does make it feel like Christmas. :)