The thing about winter...

           Everywhere I’ve ever lived, winter has always been accompanied by cold weather. Even when I was stationed in Southern California, I wasn’t in subtropical San Diego. Nooo — I was on a mountain about 70 miles east of downtown, where it snowed in the winter and they issued us parkas. San Diegans would come up dressed in tee-shirts to fill their pickup beds with snow, and we’d pull them out of ditches, shivering, when they slid off the road.

           Winter isn’t this way everywhere. Second cousin Harry used to send Christmas cards from Hawaii with Santa on a surfboard, and Uncle Henry would send cards from St. Petersburg with Santa in swim trunks putting gifts under a decorated palm tree. Henry migrated there with Aunt Marie after too many winters in the Catskills.

           January is usually the worst. If winter is the depth of annual despair on ice, January is the Mariana Trench. I was born on a day in January, 1943 (happy birthday to me, thank you), and it was a cold, snowy morning. I nearly froze to death on the way to the hospital. My son was also born in January, and it snowed that morning too. In 1972, however, I was wearing more than my mother.

           I shouldn’t kvetch. I follow the national weather, and I know winter this year has already been insane in the Northeast — and it wasn’t even officially winter yet. Upstate New York had more than a winter’s worth of snow over nine days a week before Thanksgiving. My friend Clarke, who lives in southwestern Massachusetts, entertains me with enough bone-chilling tales about her white-knuckled drives to see her grandchildren to remind me of why I moved south decades ago.

           Except not south enough, I guess, because the cold still finds its way into my bones. Never have I thought about moving to Florida, though. Uh-uh. Hawaii maybe, but who can afford Hawaii? Cousin Harry apparently could, but then he’d been living there at least since the 1940s. By the ’60s Harry was living in San Diego, which is almost Hawaii on the mainland, climate-wise. But before you ask, California is out too. If you’ve ever driven the freeways, you’d know why.

           Winter always makes me feel old. Okay, I am old, but it makes me feel older. When I was a kid it was fun. When it snowed I built forts and had snowball fights. I belly-flopped on my sled down a hill. I shoveled walks for 50 cents. Today it’s not fun. Which is why I so look forward to spring, and the thunderstorms that were once rare but now seem like daily events. I can’t wait.