Cynthia L. Herzog 
I really wish it would stop snowing.
My husband and I have been moping around the house for the past few days – obviously low on vitamin D and starving for something pretty to look at and eating way too many gummies and leftover Easter homemade coconut cake which has, I think a pound of butter in each slice.
We feel full and sluggish, which is a symptom of a prolonged winter and really should have its own chapter in the Merck Medical Manual under “Long Winter Syndrome.” If you know any snowbirds in Florida, you might want to call them and tell them, “Don’t come in just yet.”
My husband is our snow watcher. He came down this morning to announce “It’s going to snow this afternoon.” Yesterday he got up early and came back up to tell me there was snow on the ground. “You Won’t Believe It” he said, and I beat him to the punchline. ” Do not tell me ! I bet there is snow on the ground.
He is obsessed with snow and reports every snowflake to me. It’s not like he grew up in Florida. He grew up in Albany, just down the road, and closer to cold lakes like Placid and Champlain, so don’t tell me he’d never built an April snowman before.
I tell him about when, growing up, my family went on a Memorial Day picnic near Buffalo and it started snowing. We packed up our hot dogs and covered our lemonade quickly and headed home. And there was also a time in July when it snowed for ten minutes and WGR played jingle bells on the radio and I looked out the window in wonder.
I guess as we get older we have less tolerance for cold, so now you have Florida practically underwater with old people and New Yorkers. Older people think they don’t want to be cold with the time they have left in the world, so why not sit on their porch with an iced tea in January watching their peonies bloom in the garden? Even young people now seem to believe that life is too short to be cold.
My mother’s mother packed up around her 60th birthday and moved from Jamestown to Florida in the late 80s. I couldn’t believe she actually moved, because Jamestown wasn’t Jamestown without her so I was mad at Florida for luring her. She settled in Fort Myers, lived simply in a small apartment community, never went to the beach, never returned to Jamestown, and spent most of her days on her porch watching the world pass.
I imagine that for her, being warm in winter was very new. She had spent her whole life in Jamestown and she was a teacher, so she had had a lot of winter stored in her soul, a lot of mornings shoveling snow from her car or clearing the driveway before school.
Nearly 1,000 complaining about the weather are moving around Florida every day, especially since the onset of Covid. And I’ll tell you – the patterns of movement during this pandemic will be studied for years and years to come. It taught us a lot about human nature, how we make decisions, and what we really want out of life. When upheaval becomes part of our own life story, what do we do? Apparently, we make big decisions. We leave our jobs, we move, we start again. It is also clear that we are looking for the happy sun as a starting point. I wonder if Florida will become less desirable in the years to come as housing prices double and triple, and the crush of humanity reveals itself in traffic jams and long lines. Friends in Florida tell me that it’s impossible to get a restaurant reservation now unless you call days in advance.
When the real spring comes here, when the lilacs bloom and everything turns green and wonderful and the farm is open and later when the corn is knee high, you don’t want to be anywhere else in the world. It’s what you earn for surviving the winter here. This is your reward.
I write because two inches of snow are expected in an hour or two. My meteorologist descends the stairs to announce the wind speed. I told him, “No winter lasts forever; no source skips its turn.
I’m not sure he believes me.
And to think that he was skiing.
