The other day, my friend from Sarasota left me this message:  “Hi Chris – it’s me.  Calling from sunny Florida,” she chuckled.  “I hear it’s pretty darn cold up there in Boston…”

It’s no secret – I don’t like winter. For so many reasons.

If you’re like me, you’re faced with a never-ending string of bad hair days.  If I wear a hat, and dare to take it off when I go indoors, I end up with flat “hat hair” or wild girl “static electric hair,” and neither is a good look.

When you have bad hair, you need to step it up in the fashion department.  Not so easy when you’re dressing from the bottom up.  I check the weather to see what I’ll be trudging through in the morning.  Snow?  Ice?  Slush?  An ankle-deep pool of dirty water?  One thing is certain: the appropriate footwear will be ugly.  Still, I attempt to pull together some sort of ensemble.  Do I wear narrow pants so I can tuck them into the boots?  Or do I try to hide the boots beneath wider pant legs?  Is wearing a dress feasible?  Or will tights look stupid with the boots?  Fashion is pretty much out the window.

Then there’s outerwear: gloves, ear muffs (can I get away with not wearing a hat?), a scarf, and a coat.  Do I risk the woolen coat getting splattered with road salt?  Will a parka protect me any better from being pelted with sleet?

In winter, I spend a fortune on skin care.  One moisturizer is for my “delicate eye area,” another for my face, and still another to wear overnight.  There’s body lotion for my alligator skin.  And hand cream for my cracked finger tips.  And a thicker, greasier version for my poor feet that haven’t seen the light of day since September.  These products may work, but with so many different scents, I smell like a mixed bouquet of three-day-old flowers.  More than one magazine article has warned me of the dangers of becoming addicted to my lip balm.  But you’d have to pry it out of my dry cracked hands.

All this planning and dressing and moisturizing is hard work.  I’m so exhausted I don’t even want to leave the house.  I think about my friend in sunny Florida, and dream of summer, when I can throw on a cotton t-shirt dress and pad around in a pair of flip-flops.