Dreaded winter

I am not a winter person. I do not like cold. I do not like being cooped up inside my apartment when I am not at work. I do not like going outside, I do not like having to bundle up in coats, hats, boots, mittens, scarves and the like. I do not like trudging through snow, shoveling the stuff, brushing mountains of it off my car, struggling to drive on slippery, snowy and icy roads (even though I know how to do it, I worry more about others who don't, and nothing makes me more nervous than either looking in my rearview mirror or looking out in front of me and seeing a Florida license plate on a car), I do not like colorless days or inordinately long nights, I do not like grey, heavy, leaden skies, in short, I do not like anything at all about winter and I would be just as content to hibernate my way through the entire season. It can snow all it wants between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but once the holidays are behind us, I would like nothing better than for the snow to be gone until the next year. Of course, this being Northeast Ohio, and in the shadow of Lake Erie, we here can always count on having a brutal winter of heavy lake effect snows and Alberta Clippers that come over Lake Erie and deliver a 1-2 punch of frigid Arctic chill combined with heavy snow as cold air makes its way from Canada over the warmer lake to dump tons of the white stuff on our part of Ohio. It's the price we pay for being denizens of this part of the state. Winter is by far the longest season of the year, with snows lasting well into May some years. We get a short burst of warmth in June and July, with autumn chill returning in mid-August instead of October like it used to. By October, it has begun to snow, so fall really only lasts, at best, about 6 weeks. Summer lasts about that long, too, from mid June until about late July. Winter is now the dominant season in Northeast Ohio, lasting anywhere between 6 and 8 long miserable months. Sometimes, I'd swear we're living in Alaska and not Ohio. I'm sure we can thank global climate change to all of this and given that the major polluting nations of the world, the US, China and India cannot agree to anything being put forth by the rest of the world with regard to limits on carbon emissions, it's my bet that we are already well past the tipping point at which we can reverse climate change. It's here and it's here to stay, unfortunately. So we can count on longer and colder and still snowier winters than we've already been having in recent years. It's enough to make me want to pack up and move to the tropics when I retire in a few years, but they'll be under water in a few years from the melting of the polar ice caps, so there will be no place to which to escape all of this except, oh, I don't know, the Great Plains, and I do NOT want to live someplace flat, treeless and prone to tornadoes. And their winters are even more brutal than ours are. So no, thank you. So I guess that if I am doomed to stay in NE Ohio, I'd better stock up on lots of nice warm clothes, extra pairs of boots, extra scarves, hats, mittens and coats, because before long, we're going to be living in one very cold, frigid and snow laden climate. Bring the polar bears down here, they'll feel quite at home as winters grow longer, colder and snowier with each passing year. Sure, the polar ice caps may be melting and it may be growing warmer up there, but it's sure getting much colder, snowier and icier here. So maybe we can make this their new home. The frozen Great Lakes will be just the place for them to be relocated to make their new grounds. Hey, maybe one day we can host the Winter Olympics. All we lack are the mountains for the ski events, at least in Ohio, but Lake Placid, NY has already hosted them once. We've got some serious hills here in Ohio, particularly to the south of us. What better boost to Ohio's lagging economy than to host a Winter Olympics here someday! Hey, International Olympic Committee, you listening?