WINTER WONDERLAND REVISTED (A LATE NIGHT PART MINI-RANT PART MINI-RHAPSODY)

People are getting pretty sick of the snow here in my part of Jersey, but I gotta say, I still dig it (in all senses of the word) cause when it comes down like it did today it covers all the slush and mess and dirty snowbanks with a new coating of pure white, it muffles the sounds of the few vehicles on the roads besides plows, and it reminds me of so many Christmas card scenes when I was a kid and winters were storybook winters, with frozen ponds to skate on all season and snow forts and snowmen and snow angels and sleigh riding and all the rest.

People around here got used to those days being something in the past until this winter and the last when climate change brought the arctic air down here and not where it's supposed to be (my nephew in Alaska only got to ski there days this season cause he had more rain and less snow than us as well as higher temperatures most of the time)...

I understand many folks are sick of it, but for me, snow falling and covering everything in one simple shade of white, looking so clean and pure and magical, still makes me smile, as it did today. And fact is, it'll be gone soon enough and by summer some of the same people complaining now will be whining about the heat. That's a whole other story (and just for the climate change deniers out there, January was the hottest January on record, despite the cold weather in Jersey and other parts of the country)...