I know, I should be delighted by our mild(ish) winter weather. I’m not. Why? Not because I fear climate change and a warming globe that this moderation probably signals. No. It’s for practical reasons.

It’s essential to devote my late autumn weeks preparing for a real winter. So I stocked up on wood, had the woodstove cleaned, taped inside the door frames, blocked holes in the basement with handy aerosol foam. I bought a new set of Yaktrax too, and with much effort, fastened them to my snow boots. They’re by the door, waiting, ready to carry me safely across four meters of ice between the car and my front door. (I might even take a winter stroll in them.) I even purchased a new electric bed mat—conveniently still in its box. 

And what about endless bare fields out there? Those lifeless swaths of defoliated trees, brown and black, would be transformed to beauty, even lightly dusted with crisp New York snowflakes. I grudgingly admit I spotted a hint of winter splendor one morning—it lasted a few hours, then evaporated to be replaced by the bleak landscape. 

One crispy cold morning, I was somewhat mollified by a spectacular yet snowless sight as I drove down Route 17 toward Liberty. Following it for four or five miles, I resisted an urge to pull off the road to photograph the mystery of that entire southern hillside. It radiated with a mysterious dull glow. Some might have felt its power menacing; the entire forest, one hillside folding into the next, every tree completely bare, was a shivering wall of icy blue-grey. I slowed the car to enjoy it a little longer. Reaching Liberty, there was no sign of it. And an hour later, driving northwestward, it had vanished. That transcendence is part of the beauty of our dynamic, unpredictable climate. 

Besides gazing onto a glorious white landscape, however temporary the sight, we want to lie on it, and play in it—at least plod through it, with snowshoes or Yaktrax. A short stroll frolicking with a gleeful dog is no chore in snow. I’m beyond the age for ski slopes, but I could join the grandkids tobogganing and sleighing, waving at them from my safe post downhill. Have we had sufficient snow even on the shallowest hills for the youngest among us? 

And what about those friends and neighbors who flee our Catskill winter for Florida or Arizona? They’re waiting for photographs of their lonesome white-carpeted dwellings in Parksville, Delhi and Syracuse. Not to mention naked shrubs and trees dependent on a winter cover to properly engage in photosynthesis and other hidden transformations. 

Whether it’s due to global warming or if it’s simply a freakish start to 2024—even if it ends in a two-foot deluge of white in April, I promise I will never again complain about winter.

B. Nimri Aziz, a resident of Delaware County, is an anthropologist whose career largely focused on Himalayan peoples. Her new book, “Yogmaya & Durga Devi: Rebel Women of Nepal,” is available at Amazon.