Did someone say “Let it snow”?

Yesterday morning we woke up to dire news that New York City was about to be pummeled by a “beastly bomb cyclone causing widespread blizzard conditions,” according to a hyperventilating copywriter at CNN. Twenty inches of snow was expected in Central Park! Authorities were supposed to ban most travel throughout the city and counsel residents to stay home.

Stew and I, though, smiled, a bit envious. That must be a beautiful sight. The trees and greenery of Central Park covered by a delicate mantle of snow that would also conceal the ravages of human traffic and other indignities suffered by the park during the rest of the year.

In fact we’ve been known to visit New York at Christmastime precisely to enjoy the energy of holiday sights and sounds, catch a few plays and also a whiff of bracing cold, and if we’re lucky, a day or two or snow. Our coat closet is still packed with heavy coats, scarves, gloves, sweaters and other cold-weather paraphernalia waiting to be summoned into service.

Wish we had some of that here, if only for a week or two, an area of central Mexico where we’ve lived for about twenty years and supposedly boasts a “perfect climate.” That means seven or more rainless months, mostly cloudless skies and midday temperatures reliably between seventy-five and eighty degrees. After enduring gloomy months of winter and feeling like they’re trapped in a dreary film noir our northern friends might wonder if our winter nostalgia might not be an early sign of dementia.

Our strange hankering for snow and a bit of winter is stranger still because we lived in Chicago for about thirty years, a city notorious for its harsh winters though really not much harsher than Toronto, Minneapolis and other cities that high up on the globe. In any of those places, bitching about the cold is a lament intoned daily.

Still, we tend to concentrate on the highlights of winter, like my riding my bike five or six miles to work every day, flanked by the trees and greenery of Lincoln Park on one side and the-ever changing visage of Lake Michigan on the other. Sometimes—particularly when I didn’t particularly feel like going to work—I would have to fight the urge to pedal more slowly or pause altogether to take in the views, particularly during the blasts of color early in the spring and fall—but also when the landscape was blanketed by fresh snow.

In Chicago, Stew and I also had a lakefront cottage. While other Chicagoans would shut down their cottages during the winter, it was during that time we most wanted to be there. It was quiet, with noisy boats mercifully pulled out of the water for the season. Inside, we compensated for the creaky energy inefficiency of the cottage by keeping a wood-burning stove going the minute we arrived for the weekend.

But no one enjoyed the cottage, especially after a hefty snowfall of ten or fifteen inches, more than our dog Pooch, a motley mix of border collie and who-knows-what. On those days Pooch would twitch with excitement on the back seat of our truck and leap out when we arrived, sometimes doing what seemed like a belly flop on the snow, followed by frantic figure-eights on the vast lakefront lawn, chasing any ducks or geese around, and barking and jumping incoherently. In his canine brain I’m sure life didn’t get any better than that—or in our minds as watched him.

Now back to reality. Yet those fond highlights can’t erase the undeniable unpleasantness of winter, or make us feel like returning to Chicago. At the ranch though, the past three rainless months—with two or three more to go—already have fried most of the landscape and turned it into kindling that feeds the frequent brush fries no one tries to put out. Even many of the seemingly fireproof prickly pears turn into charred clumps. It’s just the dry season.

But when I stop to look closer at the ground during our morning walks, there’s already green stubble already sprouting from the seared soil, even without the encouragement of spring rains. Following that, the thorny huizache bushes, another hardy desert denizens are sprouting delicate yellow flowers, also unprompted except by longer hours of sunshine. Our peach trees are starting to flower also. Some farmers have begun to plow their fields, trying to awaken the dry soil probably a couple of months too early. Guess they are impatient too.

Rains will begin around June, almost daily, beginning in late afternoon. The miseries of rainless months and sere fields will fade, covered by rows of corn and finally by thousands of yellow daisies and cosmos making their brief annual appearance at the end of September.

By then we’ll probably remember that we haven’t been to New York for Christmas for a couple of years. It may be time.