So I'm standing there naked in the kitchen.
Mind you, this isn't something I make a point of doing. It's the end of January, and this is Minnesota. Early in the morning, the kitchen is just as cold as the rest of the house, no place to stand around naked.
You have to understand that at this time of year, the North becomes a desert. Our intense cold wrings every trace of moisture from the air. If you don't slather on moisturizer, you turn into an ice-mummy. Fortunately, there's no need to resort to bear-grease, like in the old days.
So, I'd just toweled off from the shower and rubbed down with body-lotion. Waiting for my skin to absorb it, I ran downstairs to plug in the waffle iron.
That's when it happened.
The ray of sunlight was streaming in through the kitchen's southeasternmost window. Standing there with the light shining over most of my body, I realized with a shock of delicious surprise that the sunlight actually felt warm. It's the first time since November that our sunlight has had any palpable warmth to it. As the air of its moisture, so too does our mighty Winter strip the sunlight of its heat.
Our Sun, our god. Far away in the sky, he reaches down and, 92.96 million miles away, we feel his touch on our skin. No wonder they call him "Long Hand." Winter is waning, and the Sun grows daily stronger.
The cowans can keep their invisible gods for all of me.
Give me instead the visible gods, the ones you can feel on your skin.