With winter officially here, it's time for little kids to start hoping and praying for snow. For some, it will be their first snow; it has been several years since I have seen measurable snowfall. And, the way this winter has gone, it might be several more. It is with a slight twinge of guilt, and a little sorrow for those kids, that I say "Tough; some of us like these mild winters!"

For someone who hates being cold as much as I do (and there's nothing that you hate more than I hate being cold) I sure do seem to find myself shivering an awful lot. I'm one of those types who can't understand why "global warming" and "crisis" always seem to be found in the same sentence, though when I put my mind to it and think about the ecological devastation that would result from global warming, I start to understand. (Though the depth of my understanding is often directly linked to the thermometer; I'm much more globally aware when I'm comfortable, and I'm much more comfortable warm than cold.) Maybe I should just stop cheering for global warming and move to the equator; I've always wanted to see those giant Galapagos turtles, anyway.

With my luck, though, moving to the equator would just result in a new and unanticipated Ice Age. No matter how hard I try, I can't escape the cold. I remember going to Michigan for my cousin Steve's wedding, and stepping off the plane into 24-degree weather. In August. (Steve and I talked about that not too long ago; he told me I was crazy, until I mentioned that our plane had landed at night. "Oh, sure, if it was that cold at night I believe it," he said. Did I mention that this all happened in August?)

In college, it was especially hard to escape the cold, because I so often lived in houses that were past the point of being condemned. Broken windows were so commonplace that we often didn't notice them, perhaps because we were too busy noticing the holes in the floor, doors that wouldn't shut, and so on. One house was so cold that running the heat didn't help at all. (It helped the power company a great deal, but that's not what I meant.) Fortunately it had a fireplace; unfortunately, it was one of those "efficiency fireplaces" and wasn't big enough to hold real logs. Once you got the kindling lit you were pretty much done, and not one bit warmer.

To give you an idea of just how cold it really was, consider that one of my roommates was from Connecticut, and the other was from Buffalo, and they were freezing, too. Somehow, one of us had the brilliant idea of burning coal in our fireplace. The university kept huge piles of coal in a field nearby; we figured that it was used to heat all of the buildings on campus, but we really didn't care what it was used for, as long as they didn't notice that they were losing about a garbage can-full of it every few days.

What we didn't know was that lighting coal isn't quite the same as lighting charcoal, despite the similar appearance. After much trial and error we devised a system that required quite a bit of kindling and more than beginner's level-knowledge of building science. When the multi-leveled wood-and-coal pyre was lit, there would be a cheery coal-blaze going in just a matter of hours, provided someone constantly monitored the process, and added more coal and kindling as necessary.

I had very early classes that winter, so I never had time to build a fire each morning. But I could walk out of class, sniff the air, and know whether or not one of my roommates had, because our coal-fires had a definite distinctive air about them. (You must understand that I lived several blocks from campus to realize just how distinctive-- and strong-- that smell was.) But since they were nice warm fires, I had no trouble tolerating the smell and the soot; down the road I'll find out whether they were worth whatever strange lung diseases I'll no doubt came down with.

Several years later, my standard of living had advanced to the point where I lived in a real house and went to a real job every day, and could afford to pay the power bills no matter how outrageous they got, and if the heat somehow failed, I could afford to get it fixed rather than warm myself over the oven. But none of that helped the night that more than a foot of snow was dumped on us.

I wasn't at home when it became obvious that we were in for more than light dusting of snow. I worked at a cable TV network, and my job was to keep our programming running on schedule for 12 hours a day. Once the blizzard hit, that was changed to "whenever we can get someone up there to dig you out."

At 10:00 that first night, it all became moot anyway; the snow was coming down so hard that our signal couldn't get through to the satellite. Instead it reflected back into our dish and fried the transmitter, and suddenly we were off the air. My job responsibilities were suddenly drastically cut, and boredom quickly set in; there just isn't a whole lot to do in an off-the-air television station owned by nuns. Oh yeah, it was also Lent, so they weren't eating, and weren't feeding me, either.

I was there for four or five days before relief arrived. Most of the roads were still closed, but I didn't care; I had four-wheel drive, and my parents had a generator! I was going to their house for real food, a hot shower, and a lot of sleep.

Or so I thought. The food was there, all right, but when it was time for that shower my Dad informed me that the generator powered the heat and the kitchen, but not much else.

"You mean it's not hooked up to the water heater?" I stammered, as much from surprise as cold. "Don't you know that that's the first thing you make sure a generator is tied into? How did you get to be a doctor, anyway?"

Eventually I got that hot shower, and the sleep I needed. The next time I was without power for an extended period of time was when Hurricane Opal tore through the lake in early October of 1995. It was still warm enough that the cold didn't bother me at all; it was the fallen trees that blocked access to groceries for eight days that I didn't like. (That and the fact that when the power is out at our cabin, the bathrooms don't work.) Since then I've been lucky. And until people wise up and take a real interest in greenhouse gases and the havoc they are causing, I probably won't have to worry about being cold. And that is worrisome. (And if I'm worried that it's not cold enough, there is a serious problem!)