I'm dreaming of a mild Christmas

A mild enough day--temperature in the fifties, the sunniest day we've had in a week. This is not the Christmas of my childhood. We had serious snow in those days. Feet of it, several times each winter. Enough snow that my backyard was heaped with snow deep enough to tunnel through pretty much from early to mid-November until early April, at the least.

When I moved to far northern New York--the real North Country, north of the Adirondack Mountains--the snow was even more extreme. Summer, we used to say (sort of joking), was the one bad week of ice-skating in August. Snow from early October all the way into May. Then, further south, but into the country of lake-effect snow, snow storms in Syracuse and Ithaca were monumental--like climate, rather than paltry seasons. At least once every year we'd have an ice storm of the sort Frost describes in "Birches." The ice would coat everything, sometimes as much as an inch of absolutely clear ice. The slender branches of trees sheathed. Roads so treacherous you drove slowly--if you drove at all--and even that was no guarantee that you wouldn't skid uncontrollably.

Now, here in southeastern Pennsylvania, winter becomes increasingly less winterly. I remember shortly after I moved here a few monster storms, but not so much so these days. A couple of years ago we had a nice blizzard that left a foot or more of snow, but that was a couple of years ago, and we've had little snow since.

Most people dream of going to Florida when they retire; not me. Give me Montana, the Rockies, the space--absolute dumps of pure white snow.

I wrote this poem for Thanksgiving, but it fits today, as well:

Sixty Degrees

and they call this Thanksgiving. Good God,
when I was a child we often ploughed through
snow to walk to my great-aunt and -uncle’s house,
my father’s appetite whetted by the sweat
expended to shovel our double-wide driveway
the whole way across and heave the wet
snow over the white picket fence into a small
chain of mountains in the backyard. I step
outside to bring in wood for the fire we won’t
need tonight and I’m warm in the tee-shirt
and pajama bottoms. Sandal weather in the second
half of November. You can’t even call it
Indian Summer; we’ve had not even a week’s
worth of weather that qualifies as fall, two mornings
when the far slope glittered with frost, and mist
spread from the ponds and rose in ghostly
corkscrews into the morning sun. I’ve heard
that in twenty years all the ski resorts in New England
will be closed because winter temperatures won’t
ever drop enough for it to snow. I used to say
I wanted to retire in Montana—wide expanses of
land,the jagged peaks of the Rockies, and all that sky
curved so high and wide you know that it
won’t ever stop—and, of course, the cold and
the snow—deep snow, drifts high as a barn that
last until late spring. Jesus. Jesus. I guess I’d better
consider making that final move to Alaska.