#189 SAD

We were having this discussion around the dinner table the other night. And I was noticing how my sister completed her husband’s sentences and my wife completed mine and vice versa. I thought at the time. Hmm. There could be a joke in here somewhere about wives completing their husbands’ sentence and it would sound vaguely like a prison term. I got it. Why is marriage an institution like prison? Because it helps to have your spouse complete your sentence.
In any event we got to talking about the great Northwest, and things my recently-moved-here Southern California relatives have never experienced up till now. We take a lot of things for granted up here—rain, snow, rain, sleet, clouds, rain, misty fog, freezing rain, and rain. Did I mention rain? My brother-in-law had never encountered freezing rain and when he heard it in the forecast he was a little apprehensive. “It’s just like regular rain,” I said calmly, “except it sticks to your windshield and blinds you. But that’s okay cause it also sticks to the roads and creates spontaneous black ice patches. At least it doesn’t build up like snow... I think I reassured him.
He had heard the term “dew point” before but until the recent cold weather, he hadn’t noticed that the steam coming off his dogs droppings was an indication of how we have a slightly different spelling for doo when we say dew point up here.
And no discussion of Northwest winters would have been complete without the subject of seasonal affective disorder—or SAD. The periodic depression that many Northwesterners suffer from the endless gray days of Washington winter. The unrelenting downer which is the product of every short and miserable day being unrelieved by even a single shaft of healing light. And by “day” we mean the somber, wearing, joy-sucking dimness that is our small reward for enduring a job that begins in the dark and ends in the dark. From eight in the morning to 4:00 in the afternoon, what little light we have is squandered as we spend our time indoors, cowering from the oppressive, battleship steel-colored sky lest it plunge us into the dark oblivion of utter despair.
Where was I? Oh yeah. He thought it was unusual that the name Seasonal Affective Disorder would be acronym-inized into SAD. Reverse acro-neering, I said. The initials for Winter Blues just didn’t pronounce anything.
America, ya gotta love it.