Groundhog Day
Newsletter 2026-02-05
That no-good rodent let us down again. If you haven’t heard, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, which means we’ll have six more weeks of winter. It’s unclear if the groundhog is controlling the weather or merely predicting it. If he chose to extend winter, I question why he hates humanity. What did we ever do to him, except elevate him to the status of major celebrity/minor god? Perhaps he resents the loss of his privacy. The paparazzi can never get enough of small furry mammals. Also, his decision would extend summer by six weeks in the southern hemisphere. Maybe he has a vacation home in Brazil.
If Phil is merely predicting the weather rather than making it, I have just as many questions. Since when is checking for a shadow a valid meteorological method? Are we testing the groundhog’s eyesight, his situational awareness, or whether or not he’s made of physical matter that blocks light? If he’s transparent, that might explain why he’s been around for so long. It’s well past time that we let our ghost groundhog season detector rest in peace.
I accept Phil’s judgment, but I don’t have to like it. My household has had more than enough of the cold. The outside weather was unpleasant enough on its own before the pipes in my house started freezing and exploding. My father-in-law replaced the damaged line and got our hot water running again, but other things are already breaking down. We bought a third vehicle in anticipation of my fifteen-year-old getting her license this fall. She’ll inherit my wife’s old minivan when she’s ready. It’s every teenager’s dream. In the meantime, Lola alternates between driving the van and her new (used) car to keep them both running. When the temperature dropped, the van abruptly died. It’s been sitting inert on our back parking slab ever since. It likely just needs a new battery, but I’m not going to mess with it until the temperature is above freezing. Until then, I have a broken down vehicle on my property. I’m a Midwesterner to my core.
A groundhog is the perfect animal to represent the cheerless drudgery of this time of year. Every day is the same, except when it’s the same, but worse. It’s been so cold that even my kids are putting on coats. That’s one battle I never expected as a parent. If I’m cold, I strategically build a cocoon of clothing until I burst into flames. If I collapse this winter, it will be from heat stroke, not frostbite. My daughters are the opposite. The burden of lugging around an extra layer that will keep them from freezing to death is simply too much to bear. Their excuses are legion. There’s no room for it in their lockers. They only need it for a few seconds while they’re waiting for the bus. It hides their great outfits. That’s all well and good until the bus is ten minutes late. Then those great outfits will be covered in icicles. After that happened to Betsy once, she finally agreed to wear her coat. Not her heavy coat, though. She conveniently left that at school after one of the only times I successfully badgered her into wearing it. I should have groundhogged her into wearing it so she’d put it on over and over again. In its place, she agreed to wear her letterman jacket, which looks cool and keeps her cool rather than frozen stiff. Maybe I can convince her to start a barrel fire by the bus stop as a compromise.
The worst part of the crushing sameness of this groundhog-extended winter has to be the snow. It never goes away. We still have every single flake from the nine inches that fell here last week. Plows piled it wherever they could, overwhelming curbs and sidewalks and making every road narrower than it should be. It’s bad for driving (for my vehicles that will move) but great for my kids. They’ve been out in it nearly every day after school. They won’t wear coats around their friends, but when playing in the snow with just their sisters, they layer up like they’re going on an Arctic expedition. There’s a business near our house that plowed its parking lot. The resulting mounds of snow have been a playground for my daughters. They turned one particularly large snow mountain into a throne, a sledding slope, and the set for an imaginary reality TV show where they get mad and fight each other. Art imitates life. They gushed about their hill to me until I agreed to drive by it slowly so they could point out its best features. Their favorite thing about it is that everything they built sticks around. At this rate, the pile will still be here in June. You say cold snap, I say new Ice Age.
Someone else is sticking around: Onyx, our reluctant foster pig. He’s been in our home since a fire at his house in June 2024. For more than a year, there was no progress on repairs at his old place. Then the family fired the original contractor and hired someone new. That guy made huge progress in a short period of time. We were filled with hope. Then he stopped working, too. I’ve driven by the house several times in the last few months. It always looked the same. I suspected progress stopped because it was too cold outside to work. In reality, it stopped because a contractor was involved. There are no good contractors or bad contractors. There are just contractors. They show up late or not at all and leave early and forever. Onyx’s owner has now fired the second contractor. The only good news is the necessary legal paperwork went through to free up the insurance money they previously committed to the first two contractors. Now they can pay a third contractor who will also surely let them down. Hiring anyone in the construction industry is the ultimate Groundhog Day story. No one will be surprised if, six months from now, I write about how they were scammed by a contractor yet again.
No matter how Onyx’s Groundhog Day story ends (if it ever does), it will pale in comparison to the classic movie of the same name. I was caught completely off guard the first time I saw the Bill Murray masterpiece. I didn’t know anything about it before it started playing on a tiny TV on a dark charter bus on the way back from a track meet in college. I didn’t see the time loop coming. Days later, an English professor told us to write a 3,000-word analysis of a movie. That’s an insane length for any sort of film critique, especially when my thoughts could be summed up as, “It was pretty good, I guess.” Instead, I was forced to delve into the repetitive nature of reality and the existential struggle of man. Murray lives the same day over and over. He doesn’t escape until he sees it not as a curse, but as an opportunity for self-improvement and personal growth. He helps everyone in town, becomes a master pianist, and transforms himself into a person capable of both loving and being loved. Puffery like that is how you turn a ten-second thought into a ten-page essay. It’s my only superpower as an English major.
This winter feels like I’m living the same dreary day over and over again. If I’d learned anything from the movie, I’d use this opportunity to live that day a little better each time. Instead, I’m actively becoming worse. Onyx and I aren’t on speaking terms. Yes, I talk to pigs. It’s not like my family wants to listen to me. When I speak to Onyx, or merely have the audacity to exist in his presence, he mostly screeches back. He’s very mad that I won’t let him into the rest of the house. I’m very mad that he peed in the house the last three times I trusted him. I can handle a pig being upset with me. I can’t handle him being mean to the other pigs. The more ornery and pent up he feels, the more he takes it out on Gilly and Luna. He’s started treating the pig room as his personal domain, chasing the others around for the crime of trespassing in his space. He never appears to hurt them, but their panicked squeals make it sound like a murder in progress. It’s hard to know if they’re in real danger or if they’re just drama queens. Pigs aren’t known for being stoic. If we’re home, we’ll build Gilly and Luna a nest of blankets in the dining room and let them hang out away from their tormentor. It adds to the problem. The more they’re out of the pig room, the more Onyx treats the room like his exclusive space. The more territorial he gets, the more the other pigs stay away. We’re stuck in a loop, not of time, but of bad behavior. To end it, Onyx needs a house to go back to. For that to happen, the contractors need to break out of a bad behavior loop of their own.
