You've heard it already. Winter Storm Connor. Yeah, so it's cold and there's a big storm predicted and everything is pre-emptively cancelled and isn't life just horrible. I drive around New Haven listening to the ominous weather report and I look at the gross brown piles of ice that have encroached upon the streets and parking spaces of this miserable town. The icy snow crap that is still left from the last storm- the same storm where the city just decided that it wasn't worth plowing anymore and the streets became cobblestoned with ice and dirty muddy sand. Grey skies, grey trees, grey everything. Except for the brown salt/sand that seems to be taking over the interior of every public building in town. At the supermarket they have a grey mop that is constantly spreading about a disgusting layer of brown salt/sand extending from the front door all the way to the fish counter.

In times like this I have to remove my brain and visit my happy place. In my mind I am seven years old, playing in the frozen puddles at the end of the driveway while I wait for the school bus. In my mind I am sitting in the molded plastic seats at the Dairy Queen in DeVargas Mall, covertly eating a chili cheese dog while my mom is shopping at TG&Y. I think it was a Diary Queen. I can't quite remember the name, but I can recall the smell of those chili cheese hot dogs as though I was just there yesterday. That place has been gone for at least 15 years now. I think it's a post office now.

Contrary to popular belief, it does get cold in New Mexico. Santa Fe is at 7000 feet, at the base of the Rockies. Santa Fe has its own ski basin. I gew up with snow and cold winters and the smell of wood burning in everyone's fireplaces. There is something very different about the cold I experience here in New England. The humidity, the days and days of grey skies and the dirty icy streets that extend for weeks after each storm- these are all New England to me. I have been trying hard to remember the same sort of storm aftermath in Santa Fe, and for the life of me I can't seem to remember it being nearly as miserable as it is here.

So today while we were waiting for the other snowy foot to drop I was safely tucked into the adobe house in my head, savoring another bowl of posole and waiting to go outside and play.