The cold never bothered me anyway.

It is the strange nature of blogs that you both know so much about someone from reading them, and so little. You often think that you have an accurate view of the person blogging, but in reality you only receive an aspect of the person, a curated and corrected aspect. Still them, but a limited them.

And sometimes I wonder that there is a very key aspect of my personality that this blog cannot convey: I am loud. I don’t just mean that I can be loud, I mean that I am loud, as an integral part of my personality. I can project to the very back row of an auditorium, I can out-yell a pack of cheerleaders, and my inside voice only counts if we are inside a stadium. Anyone who had to describe me would most likely include loud in the first three adjectives.

In fact, I am the textbook extrovert, which is to say that I am energized by people. I LOVE PEOPLE. Being with them, talking with them, working with them — put me in a room of people and I will organize a party or a musical or both. After graduating college I completed a curatorial internship at an art museum, eager to throw myself into my chosen career. By the end of the summer I had realized that I love everything about museums and art history… except working in them. One day I only spoke six words all day, and I know because I counted every precious word. While I love paintings, this was not the job for me. Instead, I turned to teaching, where my extroverted soul gets to feed off of a captive audience all day long.

But remember, energy is not the same as peace, as calm, as rest. For those things, I desperately crave silence and stillness. We ignore this, in those endless Internet articles about things the world doesn’t understand about introverts or whatever. Humans are more complex than those lists. We can be loud, love people, and still need silence to not get overwhelmed by ourselves.

Last week James was out of town, and on Saturday the only time I spoke all day was to order at Starbucks. It. Was. Glorious. Being productive aside, sometimes you just need to be silent for a little while. I usually try to write on here a couple times a week, but in the past week, I just needed a little break. Sometimes you just need to stop speaking for a little while. Sometimes silence can be comforting.

I think that is one of the things I love about winter. Tomorrow March is here, and with I hope to find warmer days and nature’s reawakening.  But life will also start getting busier, a process that continues until winter, when silence and stillness settle around us whether we like it or not. Life will start getting louder, as the muted world of cold will slip into the sounds of rebirth and activity.

We had our last (maybe? hopefully?) snow this week, one that fell fast and heavy around us before melting by evening. I love the sound of snow, the sound of absence that comes with the muffled world outside. There are days when I stare longingly at my sundresses and bemoan another day in boots, but I will miss this later. I will miss the slowness, the stillness, the silence of winter. I honestly think I would hate a year without winter. So winter, it’s time to bow out gracefully, but thanks for a little silence in the middle of our noisy years, a little calm in the middle of our busy lives.

Oh and in the middle of my quiet week, I also fell deeply in love with the Frozen soundtrack. Come on friends with kids, who is going to let us babysit when it comes out on DVD so I can justify watching it? I am not even going to tell you how many times I listened to this version over the past week.