Hibernation – is it so wrong?
I don’t care WHAT T.S. Eliot says, November, not April, is the cruelest month. The bottom drops right out of autumn along with all the leaves, then the rains come and so do the winds. Up here in the northern latitudes, the sun sets further and further south and earlier and earlier. God help the poor folks who live on the north side of the hills — they might as well be in the Arctic.
Humans, or so the scientists tell me, aren’t programmed to hibernate. That may be true, but you can’t tell me there’s no vestigial urge to hunker down and wait until spring brings my sap back up with renewed energy. I know folks who sit in front of a full spectrum lamp trying to fend off the winter blahs, hoping to trick the hormones that trigger the blues into thinking it’s a summer morn. Some of them revert to alcohol, balm of all us northern climate dwellers, probably just a self-induced hibernative state. And the neighbors who can afford to, they just pack it up and leave. Head for the sunshine of Arizona or Nevada, figure a trailerpark in the desert beats what we got.
I spoze we all have burdens to bear. Tahitians got coconut grenades dropping, Hawaiians got island fever. If there was a paradise, the cruise ships would ruin it in a season, the investors would cover it with resort hotels and Vegas-style casinos, the residents would work as maids and valets. Count yer lucky stars, I tell the mizzus, if there was Garden of Eden, we’d be the landscape crew, minimum wage, with Adam and his cranky wife barking orders, never satisfied with the weeding and edging, always wanting that damn apple tree pruned half to death, no wonder it never produces fruit. Naw, a month or two of rainy, windy weather, what the hell, maybe ought to catch up on our reading. And … a little extra sleep wouldn’t hurt either.
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