COMMENTARY: Good riddance, winter | Jefferson City News-Tribune

I wrote a column last year about how summer had gone from my favorite to least favorite season. That change was largely the consequence of two factors: retiring from teaching (summer no longer meant "school's out") and having spent way too many summers in a place, Arkansas, whose geography seemed to dictate an unrelenting combination of wet blanket southeast and blazing desert southwest. Alas, as the latest is about to end, according to the calendar, I've begun to believe that Arkansas winters might be nearly as bad in their own way as our summers. When I was growing up in northern Illinois, we didn't think much at all about winter, we just accepted and endured it (much like we endure Arkansas summers). It would start to get cold well before Halloween and the first snow usually hit before Thanksgiving, with the stuff staying on the ground, periodically and abundantly replenished, until April. We adapted to winter every year gradually and thus fully. Nobody paid much attention to weather forecasts because winter days were usually the same and, if different, just worse. Snow and cold didn't make life grind to a halt -- I still recall shoveling snow off the basketball courts...

Source: https://www.newstribune.com/news/2026/mar/16/commentary-good-riddance-winter/