Despondent Cold and the Hope for Something Better

 It's cold of course.  It's that time of year - especially in this part of the country.  Even by Iowa standards, however, it is bitter.  Even 0-degrees has been as scarce as a unicorn in recent days, with snow upon snow to match it.  The windchill was -32 this morning when I emerged from our warm cocoon to release the chickens and fill the feeders.  Neither they nor I met the opportunity with much enthusiasm.  

In response to my recent social media complaining (or was it bragging?  Sometimes they are hard to tell apart) a friend in a more temperate state asked if there is really all that much difference between 0, -13, -15?  The answer, of course, is both subjective and scientific.  My own "feels like" response is that I can't really tell that much difference.  Initially, at least - which leads to the more objective truths.  The scientific realities are, it turns out, quite sobering.  The threat of physical harm escalates dramatically as the temperatures fall.  The frostbite that will likely take 3 hours to occur on a 0-degree day takes only 12 minutes at -15 with a small amount of wind.  Exposed skin pays a heavy price, and even double-gloved hands are soon useless - hams attached to the wrists.  Prolonged exposure is the enemy.

I know this at the commodity level.  Even checking for eggs multiple times throughout the day, I still find them frozen and cracked.  Laid in warmth, they quickly harden and burst.  The loss to breakfast is wrenching, which is bad enough.

But this phenomenon has me worried beyond the chicken yard, and my brief forays outside.  The cultural temperatures have been just as bitter in recent months and even years - to what I fear will be similarly deleterious effect.  Much that has nourished us in the past has cracked, and though I am neither sociologist nor political scientist, I can't help but believe that prolonged exposure to this arctic relational environment will prove dangerous, disfiguring and even disabling.  How long does it take?  How much exposure before the effects are irreversible and the collective skin that binds us as a collective - that holds this odd but integrated collection of cultural bones and sinew and swirling blood cells together within its circumferencing sheath - disintegrates altogether?  

I suppose it depends upon one's particular thermometer, and whether American civilization is merely freezing, or has plummeted to -15 plus wind.  It feels to me ominously like the latter.

There is, of course, one hopeful possibility that encourages me.  Certain seeds - deep rooting prairie seeds and wildflowers come to mind - require the cold in order to germinate.  Their seed coat is so tough that winter is required, through a process of "stratification", to break the dormancy holding their promise safely inside.

Perhaps, then, more is cracking open in these bitter days than just the eggs.  Maybe deep beneath all that is dying among us are the seeds of new colors and stems that we can't yet imagine, that are even now being stratified and released by the paralyzing malignancy of our cultural frostbite.

Perhaps.  May it be so.  We can only hope that something offsetting and good might yet come of all this debilitating cold.