I’m not sure when I became such a wimp about winter weather. It might have been the year when my kids were in grade school and we had 14 ice storms over the course of one winter. (We lived in New Jersey at the time, the land of the “wintery mix” one day, and a howling blizzard the next.) I remember kids ice skating down the street. Seriously.
Or maybe it was before that, when I was around ten years old and our power went out. We lived in an old Colonial home (also in New Jersey), and I remember my mom having to buy coal to burn in our fireplace because there was no firewood to be had. And it was the bituminous kind–the hard kind that didn’t burn easily. Now that was a cold couple of days.
Back then, I could still enjoy the snow. I still loved making angels, building snow forts and having snowball fights. But at some point my love of all that “fun” morphed into not just distaste for all things wintery, but sheer loathing, to the point where the sight of a snowflake in the sky made me want to run for the hills.
And we did run…not for the hills, but for parts south.
When my younger son graduated high school, hubby and I moved to southeastern Virginia–land of streets lined with crepe myrtles, landscaped shopping centers and drivers who let you merge without throwing the one-fingered salute. Weather-wise, we wanted a change of seasons, but more than that, we wanted out of the brutal, bone-chilling, break-your-back-shoveling-feet-of-snow winters.
And we got it where we live now. Our “snowstorms” rarely amount to more than six inches at a shot, and even then they immobilize our area. It would be funny watching the native Tidewater Virginians panic…no, it IS funny, but I try to put myself in their shoes and magnify the six inches, in my head, to three feet.
But somehow over the past nine years, this version of cold has begun to…chill. To get more cold. Now I throw on a Nanook of the North parka for anything below 40 degrees, where my Jersey friends are wearing heavy sweatshirts.
I’ve become a winter wimp!
I’m not sure what to do about it, if anything. I suppose we could move south again, but the thought of selling our house, packing and moving….never mind. I guess I’ll just deal with it for now.
What about you? Are you a winter wimp?