(Thunder sounds) Hello, my name is Julie and I’m from Upstate New York. Well, actually I’m from central New York. Well, no, upstate… central upstate. Whatever. It’s a gray area, and if you’ve lived in the Northeast you are plenty familiar with gray areas. And if you’re from anywhere within a stone’s throw of the region, you’ve probably never heard someone talk enthusiastically about living in Binghamton.
Urban Dictionary’s top definition for the word Binghamton is: “Imagine how then make it cold”. It also defines Binghamton as a depressed city, and my favorite, “the place that will make you glad to be anywhere but there for the rest of your natural life.” When it’s used in a sentence, Urban Dictionary provides the example, “I may have a debilitating brain disease, but at least I don’t live in Binghamton”.
Now, I definitely don’t feel this intense hatred as strongly as others do, but Binghamton definitely tends to be a grayish city. When I’m talking about the Gray, I’m talking about the weather. It sucks most of the time. I’ve lived here my whole life and sunny days are few and far between. The lack of sun here means that more people here than not are taking some sort of vitamin D variant, myself included. And unfortunately, when sunny days come, you don’t even notice the sunshine because of the suffocating humidity. The humidity is the bane of my existence in the summer, and what’s even worse than the humidity, is the sweat.
Central New York, or upstate whatever, has so many breweries and they’re cool! Most are rustic and they look like great places to work. Recently I held a position as a food runner on a local food truck that was connected to a brewery in order to wash the shift dishes. Employees were required to navigate through the cold Binghamton weather to the other side of the brewery building, find the company’s water hose, pull it through the parking lot, snow, let it run into the food trucks water tank for five minutes– never more unless you wanted a Moat to form around the truck– and wind the hose up all the way across the snow and back into the other side of the brewery. It was awful. Between being covered with dishwater in freezing weather, and never wearing gloves, I’m surprised I never caught hypothermia. Every day was a battle against the Binghamton weather. Working during the summer meant a lot of sweating. Every humid summer shift my body caramelized into a mess of sticky skin and
Isn’t that appetizing, don’t you love a little bit of sweat in your food? I got a lot of ‘you poor girl, you need to cool off’ from customers, but you couldn’t escape the heat that easily. The only cool place on the premises was the walk-in freezer which was perfect for screaming into after all of the frustrations you had after a long shift.
We spend so much time fighting against the weather to carve this comfortable human path in the world. It’s the ultimate foe, really something that’s scary because it’s great power means that we don’t have control. Yeah, that’s an intense thought.
During this pandemic, I feel like I’m noticing and reflecting on the weather more.
It might be because I’m more sensitive the way the weather feels on my skin combined with the feel of a mask or that my finally seems to be slowed down enough that I can actually look outside.
I’m studying remotely right now, stuck in Binghamton. By choice this time. And from what I’ve gathered, the one notable thing I can tell you about this place from the past few months has been how crazy the snowfall has been this winter. 41 inches in one day to be exact, and it was pretty heavy, but I think it would be worse if the colder this winter wasn’t accompanied by the snow. It’s a welcome distraction from the fridge, despair and isolation of this winter.
But coated in Binghamton’s cold Gray blanket of doom isn’t the worst way to spend a semester. There are some cool things here, like Spiedies, a local delicacy of marinated meat cubes that are char grilled and served on a long roll, and there’s a few niche coffee shops that charge me way too much for a cold brew. And there’s the gloating aura of my former high school just miles away. But I’ll survive.
And as I’m recording this, I can see that it started to snow again. The pine trees in my parents’ backyard have the prettiest dustings of white. I can feel cool air is seeping in through the insulation fallacies in my bedroom that I’ve got to get fixed. My dog is looking up at me with huge brown eyes. I know he wants to go outside, but I also know that means that he wants to munch on the bunny poop out there, so I’m not gonna let him. He needs a bath. After a whole year of living through a global pandemic, I think we all do.
Here’s to upstate, Central or whatever New York, and wherever you live, and seeing the beautiful or even just the doable in the Gray.
Music and sound effects for this audio file were provided by “Waves of Indigo,” by Daniel Burch and “Thunder” by Michael Koenig from Partners in Rhyme, all licensed under CC By.