More friggin snow

When you grow up in Vermont, you think it's totally normal to spend seven months of the year hibernating like a grizzly, belly up to the radiator. The snow falls, is pretty, goes and comes and piles up and turns gray and melts and comes back and turns into slush, and you don't bat an eyelash. You've spent more hours scraping the windscreen in your lifetime than, maybe, you've spent drinking margaritas, or playing UNO. You're a champion scraper. An expert shoveler. You can take a car from snowbound to drive-ready in ten minutes flat at dawn, when it's so cold your nose hairs freeze.

But then, one day, you leave the state and move to a place very far away, where it rarely snows. At first, you miss the snow. It seems weird; where's winter? No snowshoeing. Sayonara sugar on snow. Mittens seem pointless.

You get used to it.

Then, years later, you come back to Vermont. For a very long time. In the winter.

You are so not prepared. For chrissakes, you've started buying suede boots again. You can't remember how to drive in mixed precipitation. And you've totally lost the ability to tell the difference between sleet and freezing rain. It feels like the part in Narnia where they thaw out the white witch, but in reverse.

Please, you whimper. Let it end. I can't take any more.

Winter doesn't give a shit. Valentine's Day blizzard, St. Patty's Day storm, Easter Nor'easter. Mayday ice storm, Memorial Day whiteout. Why not? Bring it on.

Dammit.