Winter sucks. It's dark, it's cold, and it's too dry. Unless it's too wet, which is an entirely other hellscape. But maybe it's just me. After all, I was born and raised in a desert where anything below say, 65°F (18°C) is a terrifying frozen nightmare akin to Dante's 9th circle.
When I was twenty, I moved to the city of Flagstaff, Arizona, a city in the middle of a forest on the side of a mountain. It's achingly beautiful and a place I tried to love1; Flagstaff sits at 7,000 feet above sea level meaning that it starts snowing in October and doesn't really stop until April, sometimes May. During the three years I lived there, the post-holiday January start of classes had to be delayed twice; one year was bad enough that my roommate and I had to dig over a meter of snow away from our front door. But, like I said, I tried to love it.
There were snowball fights and sledding and making snowmen in the quad. There was ditching class to take advantage of the world class skiing and snowboarding just a short drive North from campus. There was a lot to love about winter. But the second I graduated I moved to Southern California. Give me sand and waves over the damned snow any day.
Having said that, had I realized how much fun the proper kind of snow is, I might have learned to like it more. Where I live now is not the proper kind of snow. We don't get enough to actually play in, most years. Instead, we get light dustings of seriously cold, frozen snow that sticks to your car's windshield and nothing else. The air before and after these snows is ironically dry and burns your lungs when you try to breathe it in. And yet there is just enough of this unproper snow to really screw up the roads and thus, my morning.
So, to recap: I've been skiing. I've been snowboarding. I've made snowmen and I've had snowball fights. I've been sledding and I've built snow forts. And none of it has never made me more glad than when it was over and I could go back inside where it is warm and dry and where all my comfortable stuff is.
All of which is to say, I will no longer participate in winter, I will merely persist through the winter. I will simply outlast the dreaded season. I will, in short, overwinter.
From the good people at Merriam-Webster:
to last through or pass the winter
But that's not really the whole picture. Overwinter is usually used with agricultural, horticultural, or zoological topics. Both the NOW corpus and the COCA corpus give fairly respectable samples of the word in use but a quick scan suggests that, aside from birds, insects, flowers, and trees, the word doesn't get aired out too often. Which is a shame because it has some interesting roots.
Winter itself is simple enough. It's an old word and comes to us from deep in PIE territory via the common pathway through proto-Germanic to Frisian and Saxon and so on into English. Even as a verb, its use is long and well-documented from the 14th century onward. However, prefixing it with over gets a little more interesting.
Here's the key point, from Etymonline:
word-forming element meaning variously "above; highest; across; higher in power or authority; too much; above normal; outer; beyond in time, too long," from Old English ofer (from PIE root *uper "over"). Over and its Germanic relations were widely used as prefixes, and sometimes could be used with negative force.
In English, we most often use over as an adverb or a preposition. A glass of water gets knocked over, or a paper towel gets put over the cookies. Neither of these uses is positive or negative, the just indicate motion or a location. But that changes when we use over as a prefix.
Think of words like overtired, or overstimulated, or overstimulated. Every parent knows that these adjectival states of being occur way too often with children; it's a condition that persists overlong and overmuch.
"But, but, but," I hear you protest. "Those are all adjective cases and you used it as a verb!"
Well that's the beauty of English, isn't it? Every adjective can be a verb if you verb it hard enough and so, like the overgrown, petulant child that I am, I will simply overwinter. Because man, winter sucks and I'm so over it.
There are just too many trees for me to ever be really comfortable there. If I can’t see at least 60 miles down the road at all times, I start to get nervous and unseemly.