This is the world I should be looking at when I wake up in the morning. Maybe not these trees in particular, but something similar. My point is, there should be snow. Maybe in other parts of the world, other parts of the country, people are experiencing snow. People may be experiencing more snow than they can handle. But I’m not.

And I’m selfish. Because I want snow. I want crystallized frozen water to fall from the sky. I want it to accumulate in mounds and drifts that reach above my own head. I want to walk outside and wonder what happened to my car, because it’s been buried in that much snow. These are the things I want. But I just can’t get what I want.

I was excited about the winter as it approached this year. I made my way through summer and fall, and I enjoyed those seasons for what they were, but I was ready for winter. And I heard about the things people were saying about the Farmer’s Almanac and how we were going to have a lot of snow this winter. I heard the tale about how you count the foggy days in August and that those days would equal the number of big snows you have in the following winter. I heard all these things and I’m left wondering if they were all lies.

Sure, if you want to be technical about it, winter only really began a little more than two weeks ago. But since when has winter ever kept to a schedule? Winter, in my nearly 35 years of experience, has been its own entity, coming and going as it pleases. Once, during my college years, Bluefield saw an impressive snowfall on graduation day. And I’m not talking about the December graduation. I’m talking about the spring graduation. The one that happens in the middle of May.

So where is my winter now? Yes, we’ve had cold temperatures. But those days when the thermometer falls never seem to coincide with the arrival of precipitation. We’ve had a lot of precipitation, but it’s all been rain. Because all that rain hits us on the days that the temperature climbs up to the upper 50s. It’s not right, I tell you! I dare say it’s bordering on blasphemy!

I saw the forecast for this week. There’s supposed to be an arctic blast that will hit the U.S. which will drop temperatures to 20 or 30 degrees below average for January. I do like, by the way, how meteorologists manage to come up with names for weather phenomena that sound like it could be a new flavor of Gatorade: Arctic Blast; Polar Vortex; El Niño… Okay, that last one may not make a good Gatorade flavor, but you get the idea. Anyway, it’s gonna be wicked cold. But it’s also going to be dry in my general area. Not a hint of accumulating snow. No sleet. No ice. No freezing rain. And the world will keep on turning and I will keep on getting up early and going to work.

I work in a school, by the way. The kind of school that closes when it snows. Not that this has anything to do with my reasoning for wanting a decent snowfall.