Winter here in the northeastern US has been brutal this year.  Record feet of snow have fallen.  Freezing rain has iced over hundreds of miles of highway and runway. Temperatures have hovered near zero for weeks, and it feels as if wind chill factors have been in negative numbers since November.  As one of my friends posted on Facebook today, “Magic in December, sucks in March.”

And it’s snowing again today.  A lot.  When I go out to shovel later this evening — when it stops snowing, which it might never — it will be the third day in a row that I’ve shoveled.  I haven’t shoveled so much snow since I lived in Buffalo with my parents.  Which was about 40 years ago.

I love it.

Really.  I do.  I love the cold and the snow.  I love putting on a hat and scarf and boots before I even open my front door.  I love the wind, even when — or maybe especially when — it jabs into any unzipped, unsnapped, or unbuttoned part of my coat.  I love the cold car in the morning, the vinyl seat freezing my butt and the gear shift freezing even my gloved hand.  I love shoveling, the way the driveway looks impossibly long and uphill at first and then the way I feel when I’ve scraped it down to the black pavement.  (My children do not find shoveling snow as satisfying as i do, which is somewhat unfortunate for them as their dislike does not prevent me from insisting that they help anyway.) I love the way the really really cold air hits you like a slap in the face, no matter who warmly you dress and no matter how short your walk.

I love how bright the weak winter sun is on snow banks, the black-and-white of bare tree and evergreen shadows on the lawns in the late afternoon, the drama of icicles on roofs, the way my breath clouds in the night air.  The way the snow shushes the busy busy world and upends our plans, cars stuck, roads closed, flights cancelled

This cold winter, I think, is implacably beautiful in the same way that the Grand Canyon or the Atlantic Ocean are beautiful. We are so much the masters of our fates these days — or at least we are often far under the illusion that we can control our environments, that we can make plans for our days, that we can order of our lives the way we can order spices on our shelves. (Wait.  Doesn’t everyone alphabetize the spices in their kitchen?)

Books appear on our iPads right when we want them.  We watch 20 year old sitcoms or the latest movie on our TVs on demand or Netflix  We FaceTime with people who are thousands and thousands of miles away — nice to see your smiling face, friend in New Zealand!  We program our thermostats and we get allergy shots to get the kids a puppy or to play tennis in April; we sleep on command with our Ambien prescription and we Botox our foreheads to keep the wrinkles at bay. Our cars start themselves and stop themselves and park themselves. Our smartphones answer any question have — important or not: What movie was Eddie Murphy in in 1992? What do you do for a four year old with a temperature of 104? — the second we raise them.

And then it’s cold every day in February and probably March too and there’s nothing we can do about it.  It shocks us.  It unsettles us.  It troubles us, but unlike many of our troubles, we can’t make it go away.  It lingers.  It just is, relentless and unchanging and in its unchangingness, deeply and profoundly beautiful like mountains or oceans or coldly clear rurally dark nights with so many stars so very bright you feel the weight of the sky like a heavy old blanket on your head and shoulders.

I am moved to gratitude by the beauty of winter, as we are all so often  moved by beauty.  I am grateful for the warm blankets with which I cover my children, for the warm house to which we return on these cold nights, for the sweaters and mittens and down coats and fur-lined boots I swath myself in every day.  I know there are those who look into our bright warm windows from the outside and have no scarves or gloves or homes to go to or people who love them. This cold winter reminds me that we are the lucky ones.  And why wouldn’t you love that?