December 2nd...

It's another cold morning and winter hasn't arrived yet. In a usual year I have to get to January to really begin hating the cold but my whole clock has been set back one month. Call it winter hating savings time.

I remember as a child there was a certain thrill about snow and winter days. We'd often come into the house after school noses red, wet with snow, and oblivious to the cold. Snow was what we played in. Snow was our art form. Snow was the medium in which we expressed our childhood.

But I'm getting older and the charm has gone away. Snow is something in my way. Cold is what traps me inside. The early descent of night is rarely ever charming or romantic but mostly just dark. Every fragment of sun in these days is precious as gold even as I know this is how it will be until nearly April.

Someday, I promise myself, I'll move to a place where there is reasonable warmth all year around. I don't need to be in the tropics, just somewhere where I can take a walk outside in January with, say, just a sweater on. That doesn't seem to much to ask but for now I'm tied down here and left with this cold December 2nd and a hundred days or more like it to come.

Sigh.