Deep-Freeze Delerium

• Nothing on your shopping or to-do list is worth the white-knuckle, whiteout ice-crawl to town.
• If you’re snowed in long enough, you will uncoil, welcome silence, lose your fear of self-reflection.
• Pearl Bailey was right to call the kitchen “a mystical place, a temple.”
• Knitting is meditation for people still plagued by their grandma’s [insert Christian denomination] warning: “Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop.”
• Blooming oncidium orchids are clear proof of alien colonization on Earth.
• We will rail against the other woman/man until we become her/him.
• Gordon Hempton makes the finest environmental/nature sounds CD’s on the planet. You crank the six house speakers and fill your home with babbling brook, wolf calls, and summer thunderstorm.
• If you complain loud enough, your dear, concerned friends will start emailing you photos of blooming spring flowers, wild flamingos, green summer meadows. You are grateful and make a screensaver slide show of only warm, brightly colored things.
• Spectral Super Bunny makes ghostly appearances here & there, briefly, atop the snow drifts in your yard. He has a head the size of pit bull and taunts you with his mystical ability to vanish.
• Peacocks will eat leftover brown rice, onions, and garlic, cooked in hot salsa. But if you serve it on a metal cookie sheet, it will take them an hour or two of posturing and clucking and dancing around to make sure the cookie sheet won’t eat them first.
• The bleakness of a blizzard is humbling, awe-inspiring, or devastating in direct proportion to the affection you feel for the land and the amount of Doritos and Ethiopian coffee beans you have on hand.
• You find out your CD of the Dalai Lama and his entourage chanting for Vaclav Havel is actually Dutch mantra singer Hein Braat. You’ve been the victim of a viral Internet urban legend. You block out the new information and pretend it’s the Dalai Lama.
• If you practice owl calls on your back porch late at night, the owls will eventually start to answer, and you will shiver every time.
• Winter is a necessary step before spring. Spring. Before long, blue crocus and purple hyacinth will peek through the snow. And that’s why you live in South Dakota. Even in the winter.