A Winter Lament

                                      Snowflakes are kisses from heaven. 
                                                                            Anonymous
                                     Winter is nature's way of saying, "Up yours."
                                                                                      Robert Byrne
    Serious people, in my view, should pause now and then to consider the great divides in the human family. Not mere race or religion or nationality. We should consider the fundamentals that sort us out, to wit:
    -- Some people are cheerful in the morning, some are not.
    -- Some people are always on time, some always late.
    -- Some people are tidy.  Some others don't bother.
    -- Some people embrace winter, some hate it.
    The first three of these fundamentals do share one characteristic. People on opposite sides of them marry each other with regularity. This produces tensions and struggles of which much has been written and nothing more need be ventured here. Thus we are left to consider the matter of wintertime.
    Winter people are a cheerful and energetic bunch. They see jewels in snowflakes.  They love the textures of winter clothing and the hearty warmth of a good winter soup. They even go outdoors, to skate and ski and sled. Do they shiver, do they fall, do they suffer the least discomfort? Never.
     Anti-winter people, on the other hand, are morose and disagreeable for several months a year. I can say this with assurance, as I am one of them. For us, winter is chilblains, wet socks, and cold drafts that follow us through the house no matter where we sit. Presented with hearty soup and a hot toddy, we long for summer tomatoes and a gin and tonic. In winter's endless darkness, we brood about deeper questions, such as: Can there really be any excuse for the month of February?
    I have these matters in mind because the forecasters are beginning to remind us that winter is around the corner.  And they say it will be a bad one.  Here I do not rely on the folks employed by the government weather service, although they should be credited at least with enterprise. Apparently they've discovered how to generate computer models by rolling dice.
    No, I listen to forecasts that are tried and true -- such as the ones from The Old Farmers' Almanac.  This year's winter outlook is a stinker.  Lots of cold. Lots of snow, even in places that don't usually get it. Lots of rain in places that won't get snow.  In other words, chills and slipping and sliding and slop. Just about everywhere.
    Of course, even good forecasters are not perfect, and so I permit myself hope for a bit of reprieve from this vision of doom.  I wait on tiptoe for the next major prediction -- the October pronouncement of the woolly worms.  These caterpillars are colored with bands of brown and black.  If brown predominates when they emerge in the fall, the winter will be mild. If black predominates, hunker down for a bad one.
    And what if the almanac and the worms do indeed give opposite predictions?  I'll go with the optimistic one, of course, even knowing that its reprieve is only partial. I will be spared a measure of dread as the season approaches.  But I won't be spared some features of even the mildest winters. Drab skies giving way to long hours of darkness. Bare, skeletal trees. And the big one:  The clueless cheer of people who won't stop chattering that they enjoy the season.
    I insist that I am not unreasonable in this outlook. It's the way some of us are made. In fact we are recognized in literature. When Ishmael, in Moby-Dick, wanted an image for comprehensive gloom, he said he had November in his soul.
    Indeed.
    So there.