What Forty Below and A Hundred Degrees Taught Me About Faith

For over forty years, Alaska tried to kill me every winter, and I loved it anyway. Now Texas tries to kill me every summer, and somehow I love that too. I’ve decided this says less about geography and more about me.

In Alaska, you learn to respect the cold the way you respect a loaded gun. You check the weather before you check your email. You keep a blanket, a candle, and matches in the car from October to April, not because you’re paranoid, but because someone once wasn’t, and everyone still tells that story. Forty below isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a test of whether you packed right.

In Texas, the heat doesn’t test your preparation. It tests your patience. Nobody warns you about black ice here. They warn you about pavement you could fry an egg on, and mean it literally. I’ve learned to plan my errands the way I used to plan my snow days — check the forecast, time the outdoors, and never, ever leave anything alive in a parked car.

What strikes me most, moving from one extreme to the other, is how both places demand the same thing from a person: humility. Alaska taught me that nature doesn’t care how tough you think you are. Texas is teaching me the same lesson with a different thermometer. In both places, I’ve had to slow down, pay attention, and trust something bigger than my own stubbornness to get me through the season.

“Nature doesn’t care how tough you think you are.”

That’s where the faith part comes in. I didn’t survive forty Alaska winters because I was fearless. I survived them because I learned to prepare, to ask for help, and to trust that the light on the other side of a long, dark season was worth waiting for. Texas summers are teaching me a version of the same lesson, just with more sweat and fewer parkas. The specifics change. The posture doesn’t: pay attention, do the next right thing, and don’t pretend you’re bigger than the weather.

If there’s a punchline here, it’s this: I have now lived through both ends of what this country can throw at a person, temperature-wise, and I regret none of it. Give me a blizzard or give me a heat index warning — either way, I’ll be the woman on the porch with sweet tea or hot cocoa, watching the sky do something dramatic, grateful I got to see it.

Maybe that’s the real thread between Alaska and Texas. Not the weather at all. Just a woman who kept showing up for whatever the sky handed her, and found something worth loving in both extremes.

Mary Ann Poll is an independent author known as America’s Lady of Supernatural Thrillers. She writes the six-book Ravens Cove Iconoclast series and hosts the weekly podcast Real Ghost Chatter.