Winter

Well, you might try "I Am Thinking about Snow" from this text instead.

It's more difficult to consider winter from a space pretty well removed from winter, being Arizona. Oh, we get it, a little snow in the valley every 3-4 years, snow on the mountains from November through March, so you can see it, are aware of it. It's there on the periphery, and we get rains, but that doesn't amount to winter in my book. Moving here was the negation of winter. Giving up on the midwest? Maybe. A capitulation, possibly. Think of it as a rezoning of the body from sensitivity to cold to heat sensitivity. To a new outlook on salt: you need it when you sweat as much as you do down here. To a new outlook on water: it's necessary, not just an inconvenient blistering of crystals shutting down wide swaths of the country. To an understanding: fuck the lawn. Nobody needs a lawn. Sand, rocks, cacti: that'll do. They need less tending. They don't bespeak civilization in the way that the lawn does. By civilization I mean submission to the social codes of suburban masculinity, the sense that the world is under control because the lawn is under control--that the world can be subdued by periodical chemical obliteration, protected from deer and insect invasion, weekly tamed by your John Deere or your push mower because you want to show your individuality, your resistance to submission, even though privately you admit it sucks, and just want the lawn done, finished, gone. You've debated burning it. Every winter you pound it down with your snowshovel. But it comes back.

That is what Arizona means (outside of the Phoenix area with their retarded water policies). It means a yearly Christmas trek to the frozen home of your in-laws, a vacation from the lack of winter to the heart of it.