Winter seems to have passed. The snow will stick around for a while since it is close enough to freezing that the almost two feet of snow will take some time to melt (though most of it might be gone by the time you’re reading this since, at the time I’m writing this, there’s going to be rain between those two moments). The icy roads have turned to slush, the constant chill has been replaced by a heavy blanket of damp, and there’s fog almost every single morning and night (and even during the days sometimes, too, thanks to the heavy cloud cover). It’s officially spring weather and it’s still January. The long range forecast says that we might have a few more days that peak below freezing, but we’ll have even more days in the forties over the same span of time. It was pretty intense, getting all of winter crammed into a two and a half week period of time, but we sure got it all. Icy roads that the city doesn’t clear enough for anything but slow, cautious driving, multiple blizzards, multiple snowstorms that snow just enough to make driving difficult but not enough that the plows come out to clear it up, a plunge into the negatives where it is actually dangerous to be outside for more than a few minutes, and a whole heap of grey, cloudy days that don’t let one iota of sunlight through. All in a two-week period. What a winter this has been, even when it’s barely a month old.

I miss the drawn out, calm winters of my youth. I miss cozy days in front of a fireplace with a warm beverage in hand. I miss knowing the snow will stick around for a while. I miss the gradual drop and then slow rise in temperatures. I miss the predictability of it all. Winter used to be my favorite season because it was an opporutnity for me, as a child and adult, to indulge in my preferred type of coziness. It was a time to take things slowly and methodically, to relax and appreciate the quiet world around you as it finally slows to almost a halt. It was a time of tea, of blankets, and of doing something silly like making a snow angel in your pajamas or sticking your bare feet in the snow so you can send your friends a picture saying “looks like about two feet of snow.” Sure, I can recapture some of that these days (and did, which is why that last one is so specific), but it’s difficult to actually enjoy it all because there’s so much uncertainty wrapped around the changing of the seasons. Summer either lingers or ends incredibly early. Sometimes we skip spring and go straight from a heavy, long winter to a scorching summer. Sometimes fall gets dragged away by summer in the middle of what should be fall’s peak and sometimes fall drops to near-winter weather so quickly the trees are scarred by the sudden change. And all that has happened since the start of 2022.

Growing up, I was a Weather Kid. I enjoyed trains and dinosaurs and big construction vehicles since those somewhat gendered interests were thrust upon me by my parents, but my first major interest that I was able to pick for myself was weather. I even got to take the special childhood trip my parents treated each one of us to (it was tied to the religious ceremony of receiving our First Holy Communion in the Catholic Church, but we each got a fun trip out of it so I try to focus on that part) to Boston so my mother and I could visit Mount Washington, the home of some of the most extreme weather in the US. I studied rain and cloud patterns, learned to predict the weather, and set my sights on being a meteorologist until my parents eventually convinced me otherwise (I still think they wanted me to follow in their footsteps and become an engineer since I showed their same proclivity for mathematics and practical thinking). That was my primary passion as a young child and an interest that has stuck with me ever since. Which is why I write about the weather as much as I do and probably why I feel as anxious about climate change as I do.

This is why stuff like the two-week winter of 2024 stresses me out. I know why this stuff happens. I can see the ripple effects reverberating through the years. I’m increasingly preparing myself for my state, once know for its harsh winters, to turn into a relatively mild zone as heavy snow outside of strange weather events becomes a thing of the past. The climate IS changing and while its too late to stop things from getting bad, it’s not too late to stop them from getting worse. The best time to start addressing climate change was in the 1900s, when the first reports of it began to circulate and the various oil companies did their level best to bury it or lobby it out of existence. The next best time is today. I don’t think I’ll ever see the winters of my childhood and teenaged years again, not unless I move further north, but it’s still worth trying to solve this problem so future generations can inherit an inhabitable world and maybe even fun, cozy winters if we’re lucky.