People Who Love Chicago

I live in Florida, and have for the past ten years. It can be said I have not adapted well to the heat. This winter, like in many places around the country, my town has seen record cold temperatures.

Something happened one day—a Saturday, when I had time to notice—when the temperatures dipped into the thirties and forties. I ran out to the Target to pick up a few things. On the way back to my car, I noticed that a light, chilly rain was falling. I looked up into the sky. It was a low, overcast, pale-gray. The wind had a bite, and a cold rain began to chill me in a familiar way. I had bundled up in heavy socks and shoes and a toasty-warm fleece jacket--because that’s what Floridians do when the temperature dips down from its normal 80 degrees--so I was thoroughly prepared for the cold. Something about the feel of it all made my heart leap up in joy.

It was Chicago. Just like Chicago. In early November.

I recognized it immediately and instinctively. It was as if I were transported back to my old neighborhood on the near-South Side. In my mind, I was trekking down State Street, looking in the store windows. I was strolling down Lake Shore Drive gazing at the deep, cold, forbidding waters of Lake Michigan. I was waiting for a bus on a windy corner on Halstead Street.

I was there.

This cold, and chill, and rain made me feel incredibly alive. I had to get out and walk around in it. So I drove home, and leashed up my little Papillon, Markie, and started walking. We walked all around the neighborhood, even though there was a light, icy rain falling. No one else was walking, and in fact, I saw people in cars that went by, looking at me like I must be a little mad. “Yes, I’m a little mad—but I’m from Chicago,” I replied in my mind. As if that were an excuse they would understand perfectly. As if that explained everything about me. And in many ways, it does.

That’s the thing about Chicagoans, they are a strangely sentimental group. All that bad weather that scares other people off, horrifies them, in fact—that is the stuff we are made of. The grayness, and the biting, go-right-through-you, wind, and the icy rain, and the snow and the sleet and black ice—it’s all a backdrop to all our experiences, both good and bad. We have kissed lovers in the icy rain. We have slid across black ice on the way to holiday gatherings. We have stood at gravesites in drifting snow and below zero temperatures. It’s a part of us. We can’t separate it from us. It makes us passionately love the city and all that happens there.

As the cold temperature frosted my hips and thighs, it seemed to conform that I was not built for the heat of Florida, but I was perfectly adapted to the inhospitable chill of Chicago. I recognized that I could stay out in this weather for hours. I was almost tempted to find out how many hours, but I had my dog with me, and though he is well covered in fluffy, black-and-white fur, I’m not sure how his footpads will hold up on the cold cement. He was raised in Florida, and I’m not sure to what degree he’s adapted. So, I took him home.

My hips and thighs stayed cold for hours and hours afterward—yet I didn’t mind it at all. I have the insulation of Chicago, it seems, reinforced by generations of Chicago ancestors, and even before that, people who were adapted to the cold Warsaw winters.

I realized one thing. Even though I now live in comfy place like Florida, I will return to the frozen North many times. I will have to—it’s in my blood.
Even in the dead of winter.