It’s Snowing in Upstate New York

What it’s like to live through a six-month winter, and what it can teach you about… I don’t know, life and stuff? I’m cold.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle

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A small town covered in snow. It looks idyllic. It feels like Hades blew the chill of the grave straight into your bones.
I’m the snow-covered lump on the left. No, the other one. Photo by Josh Hild on Unsplash

Winter in upstate New York always lasts just long enough to make you sure that spring will never actually happen ever again. Before I moved here, back in 2018, I Googled “weather” and learned that it typically snows from late October through April, sometimes the beginning of May — at least five months, often more like six.

The fact that I still moved here after Googling this mystifies me. I did send a round of texts asking if we could call it off. But my partner had already taken a new job, and quit his old job, and sublet our apartment to a college student, so move I did, and now I can tell you what six months of snow feels like.

It feels like this: One day, the snow starts falling. It’s pretty. It’s white. It doesn’t stop. You go inside. You eventually stop going outside for anything other than emergencies. You accumulate layers; first it’s two pairs of socks, and then three layers of shirt, and then a wool hat that you wear indoors, and then it’s a hoodie made out of thick blanket material that you sleep in, and eventually start to work in, and then an additional couple of blankets over your work chair and blanket hoodie and three…

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