This winter has been rough. For nearly 20 days after New Year’s, the temperature never rose above 20 degrees Fahrenheit in downstate New York. My kids would not go out and play, and I couldn’t blame them; my dog barely wanted to go out to do her business. One snowfall had become a kind of frozen permafrost across our lawn. The street was full of rock salt that gets dug into her paws. For our scheduled winter break, we took a few days in Florida. Eighty degrees. Sunshine. Tried to soak it in over three full days. We returned on Saturday — just enough time to get groceries and pile in for the “bomb cyclone” that dropped 20 inches on us.
That 20-inch dump was the heavy stuff, the kind of wet, thick snow that drops when it is almost exactly 32 degrees outside. When it was over, it started to melt quickly, then the roads turned to black ice. Then three more inches fell. For the third day in a row, my kids’ return from winter break to school had been canceled. They are thrilled. Their parents are helplessly looking at Trulia listings in the South and Southwest. We’re not going anywhere, of course, unless we can convince most of our extended family to move, too, and interest rates drop back down to pre-Covid levels.
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