I really wish it would stop snowing.

My husband and I have been moping around the house the past few days–obviously low on Vitamin D and starved for something pretty to look at and eating way too many jelly beans and leftover homemade coconut cake from Easter which has, it seems to me, a pound of butter in every slice.

We feel full and lazy, which is a symptom of an extended winter and which 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 say, “Don’t come home just yet.”

My husband is the snow watcher at our house. He came downstairs this morning to announce “It’s going to snow this afternoon.” Yesterday he woke up early and came back upstairs to tell me there was snow on the ground. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said, and I beat him to the punchline. “Don’t tell me! I bet there’s snow on the ground.”

He is obsessed with the snow and reports every flake 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 never built a snowman in April before.

I tell him about the time growing up when my family went on a picnic on Memorial Day near Buffalo and it started snowing. We packed up our hotdogs and capped our lemonade quickly and went 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 stared out the window in wonder.

I guess as we get older we have less tolerance for the cold, thus you have Florida practically underwater now with senior citizens and New Yorkers. Older people figure they don’t want to be cold with the time they have left in the world, so why not be sitting on their lanai with an iced tea in January watching their peonies bloom in the garden? Even young people now seem to believe life is too short to be cold.

My mother’s mother packed up sometime around her 60th birthday and left Jamestown for Florida in the late 80’s. I couldn’t believe she actually moved away, because Jamestown was not Jamestown without her in it and so I was mad at Florida for luring her away. She set up shop in Fort Myers, lived simply in a small apartment community, never went to the beach, never came back to Jamestown, and spent most of her days on her screened-in porch watching the world move past.

I imagine to her, being warm in the winter was very novel. She’d spent her entire life in Jamestown and she was a teacher, so she’d had plenty of winter stored in her soul, plenty of mornings brushing snow off her car, or clearing the walkway before school.

Nearly 1,000 weather complainers move to Florida everyday, especially since the start of Covid. And I’ll tell you– the moving patterns during this pandemic will be studied for years and years to come. It has taught us a lot about human nature, about how we make decisions, and what we really want out of life. When upheaval becomes a part of our own life story, what do we do? Apparently, we make big decisions. We quit our jobs, we move, we start over. It’s also clear we seek out 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 from Florida tell me it’s impossible to get a reservation at a restaurant now unless you call days in advance.

When true spring comes rolling in around here, when the lilacs bloom and everything turns green and wonderful and the farm stands open and later when the corn is reaching towards knee-high, you don’t want to be anywhere else in the world. It’s what you earn for surviving the winter here. It’s your reward.

I write as two inches of snow are expected starting in an hour or two. My weatherman comes down the stairs to announce the wind speed. I tell him, “No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.”

I’m not quite sure he believes me.

And to think he used to ski.