a.k.a. V.J.

I could tell you in this post that it’s been frigid and snowy in my part of the world. Or I could just tell you that it’s a typical January in Central New York and the weather part would go without saying.

This “typical” January has come after several much milder-than-normal winters. It’s been a bit of a rude awakening for some. As for me, the weather has made me weirdly nostalgic for the long, cold winters I remember from childhood. The other day I started thinking about how my family used to combat blizzard-induced cabin fever by working on big jigsaw puzzles together in the living room, or how the neighborhood kids would all build snow forts in our front yards, or how my father would curse up a blue streak after the city plow would come by and push a mass of street snow in the mouth of our recently cleared driveway. (I am proudly carrying on the family tradition with that last one.)

The gauzy haze of nostalgia aside, I can’t say I love snow, especially in the quantity we’ve been getting the past couple weeks. Then again, I don’t really hate it either. I certainly don’t see any point in complaining about it — a point that possibly makes me unique among residents of the broader CNY region, who tend to see grousing about our winters as a birthright. As with most things these days, I try to take the ice, cold, and eye-popping snow accumulations as they come and make the best of it all…except when the city plow messes up my freshly shoveled driveway. I’m never taking that with equanimity.