I
It is 1995, and I am in the middle of two weeks of orientation training at UPS, along with Martha the Mormon from Minnesota. We become friends fairly quickly as the other group members drop out or are let go, and by Christmas are rather close. One day at lunch, she tells me that she misses living in a place that has seasons. Indignant, I inform her that people come from all over the country to see Ozark falls and Arkansas indeed has four very definite seasons.
She fixes me with her Withering Gaze. "No," she says. "It doesn‛t."
I have no idea what she is talking about. Damn Yankee.

II
As a child, I was highly disgruntled about our weather, which never matched the weather on all the holiday specials I watched on TV. While the Peanuts Gang watched for the Great Pumpkin under bare trees and gusty wind, we sweltered in our costumes. The worst costume was a store-bought plastic costume, which would be stuck to your skin before you rang the first doorbell. If you had a mask, you pulled it up during the trudge between houses to get some air on your skin.
Charlie Brown had snow come Christmas, and so did Frosty and Crystal and the Snow Miser and everybody in the Nutcracker. Even Rudolph had snow on his Shiny New Year. We did not have snow. (Twenty-four of my 27 Arkansas Christmases were brown.) When it did come, it was measured in inches, not feet, and we scraped up every bit of snow in the yard to make a skinny snowman with pine needles stuck all through him. Ice didn‛t grow on lakes and ponds; it fell out of the sky to glaze roads and power lines, and it usually came in January or February.
I wanted weather that matched the weather on TV. Proper weather. It rarely came, and eventually I forgot about it.

III
During all the decisions about Ph.D. programs and where to live, I gave little thought to the weather. Each place we applied had cold winters, and I paid attention to my mentor‛s advice to discount weather as a factor in the decisions. You will only be there a few years. It is a means to an end.
So we moved to Minnesota in late July, and suddenly I was in an apartment where open windows replaced central air. And, astonishingly, it was enough. I went for walks at high noon with no fear of heat stroke. During 10 p.m. trips to the grocery store, I watched everyone else in their cardigans.
Then fall came. I was drunk on the fall, the crispness and the colors. I stared out the window during bus rides and walked every day just to look. And on one of those walks or drives, I remembered Martha and Peanuts. Charles Schultz grew up and started his career here. Of course he used this weather and these houses, which I and a million other children internalized.

IV
The ice grew on the lake throughout November. I went out again today after a few weeks absence from my walks, and there were people on the ice! In the middle of the lake! Ice fishing! Riding bikes and towing children across the ice! I walked out to the end of a dock and stood for a bit, staring into the whiteness. There was once ice on the river at home. A man walked out on it perhaps five feet from the shore, and they put a picture of it in the state newspaper the next day.
I do not step out on the ice. All evidence to the contrary, I cannot believe it will hold me.

V
I am not drunk on winter. I am mesmerized by it. The ice, the snow, particularly the cold. I go out and meet it, as Becky says. Last Thursday was my first subzero day, and I was surprised by the clearness of the air, the way it changed sound and the way I heard my own voice. I felt sturdy and strong, and everything was full of possibilities. There is no depression below zero. Every nerve sits up and takes notice, and everything is somehow more, which suits an intense personality like mine. I plan to stay right here and enjoy it.