As I raise the shades on my bedroom windows and behold the leaden grey sky and newly fallen snow that coats my backyard, it strikes me that I have been looking at Illinois all wrong.
I promptly discard the notion of a t-shirt which reads 'You don't have to be a masochist to live in Illinois—but it helps' and instead, consider the state where I have spent the majority of my life in a new light.
It's not a place of maddening congestion, sodomic property taxes and bottomless political corruption. Or even endless expanses of really crappy weather.
It is a place of abundance. I just didn't see it.
For example, the community in which I live isn't a far-flung backwater removed from all that I want to see and do. Instead, it provides an invigorating navigational challenge as well as ensuring my car gets a proper workout every time I take it out.
As with our bodies, the maxim of 'use it or lose it' also applies to automobiles.
The network of two-lane roads I must use to get everywhere aren't clotted with traffic signals every half-mile. No, they are festooned with yellow-stemmed road blossoms which provide me with opportunities to ruminate and even meditate at strategically-placed intervals.
Thusly, I arrive at my destination newly-refreshed despite the elongated travel times.
Similarly, the roads I travel aren't choked with inattentive or squeamish drivers unwilling or unable to travel at the posted speed limit. Like the aforementioned road blossoms, these drivers present multiple opportunities for contemplation as I creep along at roughly two-thirds of the allowable speed.
What's the old expression? Slow down and smell the roses?
The fragrant, pre-climate change springs I recall haven't disappeared, only to be replaced by the meteorological equivalent of bonus months of winter. No. This climate-based algorithm is actually driving down the pro-rated cost of my winter apparel!
I mean, that awesome puffer coat I just had to have last October is getting cheaper by the month when I'm wearing it well into April, right?
Which is a good thing, because in this year of record-high natural gas costs, the weather has thoughtfully dovetailed with that dynamic and required my furnace to remain in service well beyond the established norms.
And that's okay, because my expense-adjusted wage will automatically compensate for it. Wait. It won't. Shit.
And let us not forget that while it doesn't remove the risk entirely, it is a fact that interminable stretches of cloudy days lower one's chances of melanoma.
Finally, I endeavor to ignore the fact that the annual property tax I pay on my exceedingly modest (it blushes when I roll up the shades) Illinois abode would translate to a four-thousand square-foot opus in my locale of choice.
The new me directs his thinking to the schoolchildren my local taxing body insists are the beneficiaries of this theft and how they no doubt embrace it as they ignore their teachers and concentrate instead on their social media accounts, the coming weekend's hook-up and/or the multifaceted outrage that is life without the latest generation smartphone.
Sigh.
Like the header says, 'Tart. Cheeky. And definitely not for everyone.'
Don't say you weren't warned. : )
