Editor’s Note: Nothing But Bluebirds All Day Long

Photo by Len Villano.

Normally I have no truck with all those SAD sacks suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder. Seems to me like a pathetic excuse made by weaklings who have to take a winter vacation in warmer climes because all the grayness makes them feel icky. Maybe even a little woozy.

Shine a light, I say.

But this past winter, with not so much snow and unabated days of gray, I felt a little sorry for the SAD sacks. You can pretend there are 50 or more shades of gray, but when it comes down to dealing with one abysmally gray day after another, shades are irrelevant. Gray is gray.

On the odd occasion when a stray strand of sunshine would poke through the stultifyingly stolid grayness, people would shield their eyes and cry, “What the frack is that?” (Sorry, got hooked on the colorful sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica this winter.)

Yes, it was a very gray winter and an even grayer spring.

And here we are in what we in Door County like to call early summer (I’m afraid spring does not exist here).

Me, I dig gray skies. They make me happy.

“Gray skies smilin’ at me

Nothin’ but gray skies do I see.”

The gray clouds are like a ceiling, and when we’re locked in from horizon to horizon, I feel safe inside a big gray Tupperware container. Cozy. At home. What could go wrong?

But, then, I come from Duluth, where gray is a way of life. I recall a winter when I was in high school and we had 44 or 45 straight days of gray (I always used to say 45 days, but thinking about it now, it might only have been 44).

Many gave up hope of anything but more grayness in their lives, and eventually even I, who usually reveled in grayness, cursed my ancestors as dumb Finlanders for ever having settled in such a cold and godforsaken gray wasteland.

After such a long while under cover of grayness, you begin to take it personally. What, you find yourself thinking, did I do to deserve so much grayness in my life? Is it me? Suddenly you have a big gray chip on your shoulder.

The sun finally came out on or near St. Patrick’s Day that year after being MIA for a little more than six weeks. It felt good. We all felt like we had made it through an extraordinary ordeal, and now it was over. Until the next day when the gray returned.

Such is life.

Perhaps this is what sets Door County apart from the rest of the world:  The world might appear to be cast in a gray pall in so many ways, but the bluffs of Door County stand the test of time, and they are a wonderful place to look out on blue skies, nothing but blue skies from now on…

Is that not why we are here? Really, who could ask for more?

Anyway, welcome to Door County Living. Glad you found us.

Abate the grayness!