Tonight I am trying to imagine snow. It was something like seventy degrees here in Columbia today and frankly, I am disappointed. It is supposed to be winter and winter, in my mind anyway, is a failure without snow.

I think I was born in the snow. I learned that my birthday was technically in the fall in first grade or so. I was utterly disappointed. December 21st is the first day of winter, I was born 4 days shy of being a winter baby. But, in Ohio we expect early snows. Snows that preceed winter itself.

The one thing people kept telling me when we decided to move to South Carolina is that I would love the winters. You can go outside on Christmas day without a coat. It can be up to 70 degrees! I kept wondering why on earth that would be appealing. Christmas afternoon is for sledding, for spending huddled up with family inside, looking out on my parent's back yard, a sloping white hill, the branches of the trees encapsulated by ice. When the sun comes out, the brightness is almost too much for sunglasses to tame. It is radiant.

Maxine used to quote some superstition that I think her father taught her when she was young. A green Christmas means a fat cemetery. She is full of superstition, but I the more I think about it, the more superstition seems to have its roots in something solid. The idea that a snowless Christmas portends an unusually high number of deaths in the coming year seemed ridiculous to me as a child. Then I experienced a few. There is nothing more depressing to me than a green Christmas. Winter, and especially the holidays, has a higher number of suicides than the rest of the seasons. The color washes out of the Ohio landscape in the winter. Color doesn't go away completely, but the land begins to look like one of those old black and white photographs that has had color added to it later. The slope downward into Seasonal Affectation Disorder is a steep and slippery one when looking at a scene like that.

Snow blankets our wet, dead misery. The accompanying ice makes even the most mundane objects shine. The iron gray sky, so deeply sad, loses its power against the force of bright white.

Here in Columbia, none of that matters. It is warm, and the plants have retained their greenness. The leaves continue to grow on the trees. I feel as if I have missed winter altogether.

The morning after the only snow that has fallen here this year, I woke up entirely energized. The night before had been a big night, more because of the snow than because of the Sanford signing. The backyard of the triplex where we live looked like a wonderland, a totally different place than the frightening tangled mess of bushes and brambles I am accustomed to. Everything was illuminated, covered in snow which reflected back the city lights. Elisha and I made snowballs from the accumulation on our steps and threw them at nothing. At the car and the neighbor's fence. And that next morning the bedroom was bright in the way that a room can only be in the winter, as the sun reflects off the snow. Light falls from the sky and bounces off of the ground. Radiant.

I knew God was smiling on me. I knew He was remembering, just as I was, the blizzard of my second grade year. My mother made us dress for twenty minutes before letting us go out that winter. There was always another layer she could add to our clothes. We ran like maniacs through drifts that came up to our thighs and waists. Mom helped us build our own igloo, and at Maxine's, Darrell and Daddy Bill helped us pack down the snow on their hill into sleek sled tracks. Our little plastic sled disks always hit the piles of snow at the bottom, throwing us a few feet into more piles of snow, which served as cushioning for the crash. One of the best winters of my life.

The winter of 2007-2008, right after Elisha and I were married, my family decided to go to the lake to sled down the dam. A bunch of bored college students were already at the dam. None of us, including the college students, had real sleds. It was mostly pool equipment (intertubes, inflatable pool rafts, and boogie boards) and some of it we covered with cheap trash bags for added velocity. We nearly killed ourselves. Our inflatables popped, trashbags ripped and we continued rolling down the incredibly steep hill. We screamed out our laughter the entire time, our faces red and frozen.

Last winter, the year of disastrous ice storms, Elisha and I became trapped on top of Carriage Hill, the steep hill where our apartment complex was located. It was dangerous just to try to walk down that hill. Everyone who tried to drive up or down ended up just another car in the 7+ car pile up at the bottom. The apartment manager attempted to get a snow plow for us, but the plow, complete with chains on the tires, slid back down the hill as well. Since the ice and snow had shut down the city of Athens for a day, Elisha and I snuggled up warm together on the couch, eating the gourmet olives I had splurged on and watching a day long marathon of the X-files.

I don't love warm winters, as a matter of fact. It seems like something has gone out of the natural order of life. I don't have any complaints against snow. Even the time my car did doughnuts down the highway after hitting a skid, I was sad to see the snow that caused the skid melt away.

There are compromises no matter where you live. Honestly, snow is something necessary for a good winter. A good winter is necessary for a good year.

This has been Columbia's coldest year in a while. I think perhaps my earnest desire for something homey and familiar has stayed the warm weather. God is smiling on me. Columbia may be in for it after all.