I don’t mind snow, when the world turns into a black and white photo. Deprived of all but summer, and a sweltering, unbearable, grey-white summer at that, for most of my life, a season of frost and muted sound continues to enchant me. Yet even in these near-arctic latitudes, winters grow short, condensed and hardened into a week. Months at at stretch go by with hardly a flake. A storm on Monday has melted by Thursday. This is unnatural in the most profound sense. Snow is water that melts into the lakes that keep our faucets flowing, our grapes growing, our wine in bottles, our tourists, our economies. Snow brings skiers. Snow feeds crops. A winter without snow is a drought of water and a drought of temperature. The forsythia have not celebrated spring for three years. How quickly seasons disintegrate, not one into another but as a whole. How many more winters will I see?