Walter Rhein Podcast
How My Latina Wife Survived Her First Experience With the Harsh Wisconsin Winter
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Today my wife is a well-respected member of the ELL department in the larger liberal city just up the road from where we live. She’s the only educator in the department who is both bilingual and holds a master’s degree. She interviewed at our local school, but they gave the job to some jerk who didn’t even speak Spanish. Later, when the school had need of a translator, they always called on my kids to do the job. I’ve always admired my wife’s strength, intelligence, and work ethic. When we lived in Peru, it was astonishing how many hours she put in. The traffic can be brutal, and the two of us would sometimes spend all day riding buses to get to and from work. It bothered me that she’d work so hard, make so little, and we were both so worn out at the end of the day. I knew that she had the opportunity to earn more in the United States, but I didn’t fully appreciate how difficult it would be to relocate. My wife is a dancer. She grew up her whole life in a climate that rarely requires more than a sweatshirt. She always loves wearing form fitting outfits that show off her amazing figure, and she has a smile that can radiate out for a whole city block. Drivers often get distracted when they see her and have minor fender-benders. She has that kind of confidence. But then her husband went and moved her to the land of winter. Her sister took to calling us the “norpoleros” or “those who live in the North pole.” They came to visit one Christmas and spent the majority of the time in bed under the covers. Her sister’s face broke out in hives from the cold. I wouldn’t have believed that possible if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Thank goodness that didn’t happen with my wife after we signed the contract for our house! When we first came to the US, we had a connecting flight in Florida. I rented a hotel for a week and we went to Disney World and the beach. An interesting thing happens when you tour the United States with a Spanish speaker. Everybody seemed to be drawn to my wife and they’d come and talk. “Where are you from?” she’d ask. “Mexico.” “Ecuador.” “Guatamala. “Panama.” “Peru!” She was excited to talk to anyone from abroad, but she especially lit up to meet somebody from Peru. The energy bubbled out of her and she was like a sponge absorbing information on how to survive in this strange new reality. Thanks for your support: 30% off [https://walterrhein.substack.com/b66e5c2e] 💙 40% off [https://walterrhein.substack.com/01f1b0e8] 💙 50% off [https://walterrhein.substack.com/0d3e6643] 💙 60% off [https://walterrhein.substack.com/6a8f4788] All these conversations ended the same. “Where are you going to go after this?” “Wisconsin.” “WISCONSIN?” Then the speaker fell silent, and they regarded my wife with a sad look. This began to take a toll and she was nervous when we got on the plane to Minneapolis. But we arrived on a warm fall day and that helped to ease her concerns. For a time. November means you’re on the downhill cycle and the days get shorter and shorter. The air gets colder. There was one morning when we were staying at a friend’s house and my wife woke up and looked through the sliding glass door at the brilliant sun. “What a beautiful day!” she said. Then she slid open the door and was hit by the frigid morning air. She stood for a moment gasping, petrified, before she was finally able to close the door again. When I saw her, she was pale. “What’s wrong?” “The sun is broken! It’s useless! It should be warm, but it’s freezing outside.” “I’m afraid that’s just the way the sun works in a Wisconsin winter.” It got darker and darker and colder and colder and my beautiful dancer wife was forced to cover up her traffic stopping body with layers upon layers of clothing. Being the foolish person that I am, I thought she’d be excited to see her first snow. One of my greatest childhood memories comes from how I used to feel when I’d wake up in the morning and see that the whole world had been covered in a fluffy blanket of snow. I remember how I’d look at the frost patterns on the panes of glass, and simply try to absorb the feeling. It felt like Christmas, and it was always neat to get that sensation on a random day. You never knew when it was going to come, and my excitement never ebbed throughout all the years. The snowfall reminds you that people are not as important as they like to think they are, there are much greater powers in the world, powers capable of completely blanketing the world. When the first snow came, we were at my mom’s house. My wife’s eyes did light up with childlike excitement. We dug through the old boxes and I found suitable clothing for her including a green and black plaid wool coat that I used to wear in high school. Then we went outside. My wife has always been one for mischief, and soon she had a snowball in her hand which she promptly hurled at me. But she was new to the North, and I’d grown up here, so she didn’t know she’d invoked a sacred law. As I reached down to gather up my own snowball, she said, “No vale.” I said, “I’m sorry darling but I must. These are the ancient rules. You can’t hurl a snowball and not receive one in return.” But I didn’t pack it too hard and launched it with an underhanded toss that was easy to avoid. At age thirty-three, she built her first snowman ever. We gave him a scarf and pine cone eyes and a mouth made out of needles. The first snow was one of those wet and fluffy occasions when the temperature is pleasant and just below freezing. That was a happy day. It’s moments like that which make life possible. But winter in Wisconsin is no joke, and it got worse. Much worse. By the end of December we were living in near total darkness and the temperature was often hanging ten or twenty degrees below zero. The house we’d purchased had a sitting porch out front. The upstairs bedroom was built over the porch and, as a result, that room never got warm. The next year, our downstairs tenant would tell me that I needed to seal up the porch with plastic to keep us from freezing upstairs, but I didn’t know that the first year. There would be a lot of things I’d learn in the coming years. Our tenant was a retired woman named Linda. She was on a set budget and in many ways she was the perfect tenant. She was frugal. She kept to herself. She always paid her rent on time. Because she was mindful of expenses, she kept the thermostat at about 65. Unfortunately the old house was so drafty that we were lucky to see 55 upstairs. We came to appreciate Linda, but even years later my wife would complain about those first few months of chattering teeth as she was introduced to Wisconsin winter. “Este bruja no queria subir la califacion.” In early December, I recognized my wife was cold and I took her on a quest to get thermal underwear. “It’s about dressing properly,” I said. “If you dress properly you can go into space.” “Uh-huh.” We went to the local sporting goods store. I bought all sorts of thermal tops and bottoms. Of all the things we bought, my wife took a liking to a long-sleeved black shirt with a Nike swoosh on the shoulder. When I close my eyes and recall our early days in the United States, I often picture her wearing that shirt. The hardest thing to adapt to was the food. Peru tends to favor free-range chicken. If you’ve never had it, you don’t know how much the flavor has been diluted in what’s available here. The first time my wife bit into a piece of US chicken, she didn’t hide her disgust. “There’s something wrong with this.” “Here, let me try,” I said. She handed me her sandwich and I took a bite. “That tastes okay.” She grimaced, “It takes like somebody rubbed a chicken flavor bullion cube on a piece of wet cardboard,” she said. Her problems with food continued. My wife is one of those miraculous people who can eat all day and not put on weight. But she found that the food in the United States was simply not compatible with her constitution. We found a restaurant on the outskirts of Eau Claire Wisconsin called Mike’s. She enjoyed the food there for a few weeks, but then even that started to seem disgusting. Then the sickness came and it lingered for a while. We’d just come to the country and we didn’t have any insurance. I foolishly called the hospital and asked when they could see my wife. “Two weeks,” hanging up the phone. “Two weeks!” my wife replied, and she began to tear up. She doesn’t normally tear up, but I didn’t know what else to do. So, I called up a friend of mine who is a nurse to see what I could find out. “You need to take her to urgent care,” she said. “Oh,” I replied. I’d been out of the country for a decade and before that I’d never really had to go to the hospital, so all of this was news to me. I bundled up my wife and took her to the clinic. The wait was still long because healthcare in the United States was a nightmare at that time. But eventually we were called in to talk to a nice enough, elderly doctor. He nodded and asked follow up questions, then ran a series of tests. We were left sitting in the cold office. That moment might have been the low point in my wife’s experience in this country. It felt a long way from home. It was cold and dark. The hospitals didn’t really seem like they cared all that much for us. Worst of all, she couldn’t eat. But then the doctor knocked on the door and came into the room. “Congratulations!” he said. We looked at him. “You’re pregnant!” Until you hear it, you don’t understand the power of those words. My wife looked like a plant that had been sitting in shadow which finally got to experience the full force of the sun. Her body straightened, and her skin began to glow. All at once, she was happy. Her tears of misery turned to tears of joy. Fortunately, my friend who was a nurse had another friend who was an insurance agent. That person told us about a state program that’s designed to cover pregnancy. They accepted us, and that was a significant step towards peace of mind. My wife had been preparing for pregnancy with all the right vitamins and personal care for some time. If she’d gotten pregnant between when her visa was issued and when we were scheduled to leave, perhaps we wouldn’t have made the move. But that was six months, and we didn’t get pregnant in all that time. Perhaps it was destiny that we were fated to come to the United States. Our first months in Wisconsin were terribly difficult for my brave, brilliant, and beautiful wife. If she’d only had me, I’m not sure it would have been enough. Fortunately, our daughter came just when we needed her most, and in a very real sense Sienna helped my wife make it through the darkest winter she’d ever known. Thanks for your support: 30% off [https://walterrhein.substack.com/b66e5c2e] 💙 40% off [https://walterrhein.substack.com/01f1b0e8] 💙 50% off [https://walterrhein.substack.com/0d3e6643] 💙 60% off [https://walterrhein.substack.com/6a8f4788] I'd Rather Be Writing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to I'd Rather Be Writing at walterrhein.substack.com/subscribe [https://walterrhein.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]
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