Virginia Peng

Does the cold make you sad?

I grew up in Alaska, so I guess you could say I’m pretty accustomed to the cold. You’d think I’d be used to it by now. Even so, despite enduring 18 long Alaskan winters I’ve always found that there’s something about the cold that makes me feel like the weather. It’s not acutely “sad” per se, it’s that feeling that can only really be articulated by a “hmph”: pensively disgruntled. It’s not seasonal depression, and it’s not that I don’t like fall. And still there’s something about the turning of the weather that awakens a feeling of apprehension, but I can’t quite place my finger on it. I’d call it the Seasonal Scaries. Like the Sunday Scaries, but instead of my GCal giving me anxiety, it’s the weather app and that crispness in the air. You can already feel the sense of foreboding permeating the chilly air. It hints at the even colder temperatures that I know are inevitably in the near future.

We’ve reached the first week of October and it’s the Sunday night before the descent into the weekdays of stark winter. I don’t want to say goodbye to the reckless weekend of summer. I’m hungover from the intoxicating freedom that characterizes June, July and August. But a pounding headache isn’t what alerts me of that fact, it’s the frigid air. The cold means that I have to move on from the romance of summer. It wakes me up like jumping into a near frozen lake. It gets the senses tingling. In the wake of the muggy first few weeks of school when everything feels coated in a film of perspiration and the lingering heat of summer, our senses are dulled –– but the cold wakes them right back up. You feel your skin tingling under the touch of the wind, you rub the bleariness from your eyes, you smell the earthy scent of fallen leaves. The cold is piercing. Breathtaking. Jarring. It’s a reality check that manifests in hats and mittens, in bright pink noses sniffling beneath woolen scarves and disposable masks. It’s a reminder of what’s to come that materializes in chapped lips and the sound of your hands as you rub them together –– like rustling parchment –– in a futile attempt to fend off the chilly breeze.

The cold keenly informs me that I’m alive. It’s a shocking reminder as I leave Bass library, buttoning my coat against the sharp breeze caressing my face and arms. The fact that I feel my bones shivering on my way to class brings me back into this corporeal world of lampshades and coffee mugs. I’ve found it’s easy to forget about the rest of the world when you spend hours in the comforting warmth of academia, getting lost in colorful abstractions. There’s something so humanizing about being cold that is astonishingly humbling.

The cold doesn’t make me sad, it makes me thoughtful. Maybe that’s why I’m getting the Seasonal Scaries. Autumn loves the East Coast, and the people here reciprocate that affection for good reason. But it does make me realize that summer has sadly come to an end and the real world calls us back. So I guess it’s not the cold itself that makes me sad, but rather everything that it implies.