Weird, perhaps, but I like the cold. I don’t know if it comes from living most of my life in New England, but I’ve learned over the years to embrace it. Like we say – there’s not bad weather, there’s just bad clothing. I know my southern friends do not like the cold, but I do. And I’ve learned if you don’t get out in it, you will be miserable. At this time of year, cabin fever and seasonal affective disorder are real things. Especially after you go through seven or eight days of barely seeing the sun (looking at you, Northwest, and especially my friends up in Alaska), you wonder why you’re listless and looking at the world as a miserable place (oh, right – too much news can do that too!). Add it all up and you retreat further and further into your cavernous rabbit hole of miserableness.

Honestly, to me ten degrees and ice is preferable to thirty-eight degrees and freezing rain. That is the absolute worst.

There are two things that save me, at least partially, from feeling completely miserable in winter. Neither of them may appeal to you, but they keep me from completely submerging myself in a tide of sloth, indolence, and desolation.

The first is the border collie. Border collies are an acquired taste, and the clearest expression of what obsessive compulsive disorder looks like. If you have a border collie and decide, in your depressive torpor, to stay inside all day, you will pay for it. They will not leave you alone. They will drop the ball in your lap, climb on your chest and whine. They will run around the house, chasing nothing. They will actually push the phone or tablet out of your hand. YOU MUST WALK THEM TWICE A DAY.

So I have to get out in it. And believe me, most days when I’m putting on jacket and hat and scarf and boots, I am swearing (Inwardly. Usually). Stupid dog. Stupid weather. Stupid people. Stupid me. Stupid world.

But the dog’s utter joy is hard to ignore and also, infectious. The same thing happens every day, and it still makes Django delirious. Dogs do not have the evil worm of “I want more of something, I don’t know what” in them. Same thing, every day? Perfect! So we go. And somewhere on the mile and a half walk, the psychic cloud over my head has dissipated (even if the real ones are still masking the blue sky and ever-present sun) and I find myself noticing the world. I’ve walked this trail two thousand times, but there’s always something different. The design of the ice on the pond. The broad shouldered hawk. The coyote scat. The turkeys moving like some huddling horde through the woods. And then, I have to throw the frisbee. And seeing a dog jubilant at catching a frisbee in the air and bringing it back loosens the ice floes in my soul a little more. “Look! I caught it! Awesome!”

The other thing that saves me will probably not appeal to you. It doesn’t even really appeal to me. What appeals to me is not the doing of it, but the having done it. For two years straight, every morning I have been standing in an ice cold shower for a minute or two. My son Dylan encouraged me to try this, said he was doing it, and so I did.

By the way, he doesn’t do it anymore. I was suckered into it by my progeny.

The five seconds before I stand in the shower and the half second after I have stepped into it are excruciating. The arguments in my head. How many people are up there, lodged in the gray matter? They are so noisy! DON’T! DO! NO! YES! WHY! BECAUSE! And then I step into it (and here, I must say that a shower with some volume is required to have the proper effect). There is the moment of AUGGGGH! And then that’s gone. I have to stay in for a certain amount of time (at least 40 seconds, if you must know, but who’s counting). Somewhere along the line, (twenty-two seconds, but like I said, who’s counting?) my body relaxes for some inexplicable reason, as if I’m actually getting used to fifty degree water.