Wonderfully stiff muscles and woefully exaggerated prose

          Tights, pajama pants, jeans, two pairs of socks, a tank top, a long sleeved shirt, a hoodie, a jacket, a scarf, gloves, boots, a bandanna (I looked like a bandit - it was kickass), and a quad's worth of thirteen-inch-deep snow.
          The snowball fight was ... I've been using "epic" too much lately, but there's really no other word for it.
          There were point blank shots to the face and alliances and traitors and flying tackles. It was amazing.
          My cheeks were rosy for hours afterward. We trooped inside, coated in snow, sweaty and exhausted, and sat around on ninth floor lobby drinking hot chocolate and tea.
          I woke up sore this morning, and it was wonderful. Stretching (the informal, luxuriating under the covers kind - not the pre-exercising kind) upon first waking up is an absurdly satisfying experience. Mornings in general are nice, all sleepy and golden, but are made even nicer when proceeded by a day of playing in the snow.

          But now the temporary warmth is leaking out of the air, and the soft mild winter we had these past few days is degrading back into that brutal season of killing cold, too cold even to snow, with that wind that rips across the flat fields and chokes the breath at your throat.
          That's when the sorry, vicious adjectives come out. Biting. Harsh. Numbing. Raw. Bitter. Frigid. Cruel.

          But even so, I could never abandon winter. My parents want to retire to Arizona, to "somewhere warm," my mother says. But without winter, I'd forget about spring. That subtle greening of branches. Those shoots making their intrepid way toward the sun. Rain. Thunderstorms. Grass. The smell of earth. All of that life, even the insects, it's all so roaring and electric.
          Maybe it's the change, not just the seasons. If it were the same all the time, I would forget to love. But as it is, I notice things I would otherwise forget to notice.
          People ask me what my favorite season is, and I don't have an answer.
          I loathe summer for its mosquitoes and oppressive, humid, sweltering heat, but I love it for its days of sun and storms and long sunsets and slow hot evenings.
          I hate that loss of the sunlight in the fall, can't bear the shortening of days, but I love all its riotous colors and cool crisp days, picnic days, love that bite in the air, that tang, the smell of coming snow and cold.
          I balk at those heartless, shivering days of winter, but I've also said here, too many times, how I love the season.
          Spring can be overwhelming, so intolerably damp and quivering, with no real footing, just mindless fecundity abounding everywhere, but I look forward to it,every year, with its energy and freshness, bursting at the seams, invigorating and exhilarating.



          ...

          Sorry about that. Sometimes I get carried away, and apparently I had a lot of dramatic writing pent up inside that needed to get worked out.
          So there was my overly-descriptive, semi-pretentious prose for the week. Hope you didn't suffer too terribly.

          Now, to awkwardly end this post!
          I've recently rediscovered the childhood joy of eating a spoonful of peanut butter. Healthy? Probably not, but you could probably make a case for it promoting good mental health ... right?