One of my gripes--there aren't many--about life in Covington VA is that it doesn't do winter right.  December - February, here, is generally, mostly kinda-cold, with a few snowfalls that almost immediately turn into slush and then vanish.  Within a hundred miles of here you can find real winter, but here not so much.
It's not that I even particularly like winter.  I'm not fond of shoveling.  I have one of the few two-wheel, as in non-four-wheel, drive trucks in town, and bad knees made me give up skiing fifteen years ago.  I guess I just don't like compromise, even in the climate.  Winter should be cold.  Summer ought to be hot.
I stepped out of the house this morning and heard a sound that took me back to my childhood in the
suburbs of Chicago.  The snow squeaked when my foot compressed it.  My cheeks tingled.  I was able to sweep the feathery snow as easily as I could sawdust from a shop floor.  Even though it was fairly late in the morning the scene was noticeably quiet.  I was glad I had my real cold weather hat on--an ugly fake fur thing that I inherited from my late father.  It has lasted so long because I hardly ever use it.  It is hardly ever that cold.
I'm not foolish or calloused enough to not recognize the hardship this weather brings to many.  There are those who have to work out in it.  (Again, I think of my childhood and my Dad, looking like an adult version of the kid in A Christmas Story, leaving for an all-nighter in the railroad yard at the steel mill where he worked.  He was mostly outside on those frigid nights.)  I know that moms--especially moms who juggle career and home are about at their wits end.  For some buying fuel for warmth is hard, or impossible.  Still, though it has been mainly through a window from my warm house, I have enjoyed this arctic blast, which for me is a blast from the past.

• I'm reminded of God's power.
• I am very thankful for the blessing of home.
• When it is this cold, I can't forget just how puny I really am.
• I am aware that my very existence on this hostile globe is dependent on God's mercy and goodness.

I hear it's warming up tomorrow, going to get above freezing.  School administrators, moms with cabin-fever, and utility workers will breathe a sigh of relief.  I'll not begrudge anyone the warmth.  But for now, I figure it's going to be cold anyhow; I might as well enjoy it.