Wind.

Winter would not be half so hard if not for the wind.

It wasn't even that cold yesterday, not by the thermometer. Just under the freezing mark. You dress for that. You put on clothes for thirty degrees, even when you hear the wind raging in the window glass. Then you get outside and realized you should have worn another layer, or three. And heavy, heavy shoes. Bubble Wrap all around your outside as insulation -- and as a safety factor for when the wind sends you bounding down the street. The wind does not play nice.

You walk into the street and with but the tiniest hint of warning, whoosh -- the wind is roaring. A frosty cinder block to the head. It wants all the air and will take it right out of you. You crawl back up to the door and wonder why you have no breath in your body, what with all this air about. It's because the wind took yours straight out of your lungs.

Even inside, the wind wants you to know that you are not safe. Every time you forget about it for a second, it slams against the windows and rattles them in their frames. Sometimes it sounds like soft explosions, banks of them, like a broadside of marshmallows fired at the house by pixie pirates. Sometimes it sounds like the wind won't rest until your house of straw or wood is flying in its dismembered pieces over a distant horizon.

I repeat: Winter would be far more bearable if not for these frigid blasts, and that's a fact. Snow and ice are dangerous and inconvenient, the short days are gloomy, but the wind just hurts. However kempt you were when you left the house, you look like one of the crazier, hairier Muppets when you get where you're going.

People get knocked down by this kind of icy wind. Not me, since gravity and I are quite close, but I know lightweights who have to grab lampposts when it gets bad. A friend of mine says she used to encourage her tiny mother to carry rolls of quarters in her pockets on windy days for extra ballast. It can be helpful in spring and summer and even fall, but unless you're becalmed at sea, the wind is not something you enjoy in the winter.

Frozen spikes to the face -- that's been the last couple of days. They say that the pain of living reminds you that you're still alive, but I'm not so sure.

In Dante Alighieri's Inferno, Satan's beating wings cause the wind that freezes the ninth circle of Hell. And that was written by a man who (I think) never left sunny Italy. He knew something.