i despise it when someone says they “hate” Polish Sausage. I absolutely love Kielbassa and all types of Polish meats. Walk into a Polish deli and you’re likely to see strings of hanging sausages, myriads of different ones, like a panorama of Meat Paradise. Because if there is such a thing as Meat Paradise, it exists inside a Polish deli…
and when the weather dips down below the freezing mark, and the outside world sparkles with ice and danger, inside a Polish deli, the warmth of that sausage calls out…and many answer, filing in and out with wraps and containers of so much meat…bulking up for the frigid winter…
the kind we are experiencing in the heart of the mountain state, where neither salad nor steamed vegetable can keep us warm for long. It is in this environment that I long for the warmth of a polish sausage, a spicy Mexican meal, or a rich, Hungarian goulash…comfort for the stomach and the soul…
But this weather pales in comparison to a swath of American-Canadian expanse where single digits always mean weather and a football fan can safely wear hunks of cheese and cold cuts on his head for a meal later in the game. This is where the real men, with serious hair on their chests, reside…a land where women often mistake dropped frozen dinners in the snow with various frozen animals, and where the WalMart deli doubles as a sauna option. This is a land where trapping for mink does not mean shopping on 5th avenue….
It is here, in the zed zone, that citizens of the Great White North thrive. It is here where Red Green is not a stoplight option but the most handsome…I mean “handy”…fellow this side of Winnipeig. It is here where men are men and women are…warm…and dogs sleeping on your bed…are equal to an extra comforter. It is here where the wind blows so hard, you feel like you’re in a congressional hearing/minister of finance meeting/Khyrzgystan naval recruiting commercial. And, it is here where raising your hands in a pentecostal service might be a sign of rigor mortis…that’s just how rough it is in the zed zone…
…a land for only the brave, the strong, or the warm….a land ruled by “the wind chill factor.”
I love the Great White North and the northern states…as long as I don’t have to visit them in the winter…
something poetic 