At 7:30 on Thursday morning, my 12-year-old son and his friend Drew were sprawled across the living room furniture in contortions that would confound the most rubbery yogi. I woke them; we drank juice, dressed in multiple layers and headed out into the snowstorm.
We drove at a creeping pace to Capital Hills golf course off New Scotland Avenue, parked in the just-plowed lot and pulled the sleds from the trunk. The wind grew fierce as we trudged out to the low ridge that juts behind the clubhouse. As the first sledders of the day, the responsibility fell to us to pack down the loose snow, which squeaked under our long wooden toboggan and the el cheapo plastic number that seems always on the verge of shattering during the icier months.
For all I know, we might have been the first sledders of the season, which had been an almost total washout in terms of snowfall. Instead, December brought fog, rainfall and temperatures in the 40s — the sort of weather that sets my teeth on edge.
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I know, I know: A major snowstorm presents costs for cash-strapped municipalities, complications for any business that uses the transportation grid and physical peril for the brittle-boned. I myself cannot believe that in more than a decade spent shoveling our front and back porch roofs, I have not been swept off by an avalanche from the slate-shingled roof above — to be impaled on the stair rail, cracked in two on the concrete steps or electrocuted by falling across the wire.
I do not care. I love a bruising snowstorm, and the heavier the better.
Marcel Proust, who was hell on wheels when it came to describing landscape and weather, wrote that the only true paradises are the ones that we have lost.
So you could probably chalk up my love of pummelling snowstorms to the fact that I spent the first five years of my life in Buffalo. Proust had his madeleine dipped in tea; I have the memory of my mother's baby-blue Volkswagen bug reduced to a white mound in the driveway of our house.
My mother came from northern Ontario, where Buffalo's winters would probably seem downright mellow in comparison.
My first kiss was at a half-buried ski cottage in Ellicottville at age 6. I'm sure Proust would have something to say about that as well.
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By the time I was 7, we had moved to Kentucky, where it only takes an inch or two of snow or mixed precipitation to poleaxe a town into paralysis. I would turn the living room lamps off and the outdoor floodlights on and watch it come down through the big windows that gave out onto the woods, knowing that tomorrow would bring no school.
This is probably why I chose to go to college near Chicago and then make my career in Colorado, Wyoming, Vermont and now the comparatively tropical Capital Region. I have not spent a winter below the Mason-Dixon since Ronald Reagan was president.
Scientists and recent personal experience suggests that annual snowfall in our region is dropping. Ski resorts feel it, from the Adirondacks to the Green Mountains. You probably feel it, too.
So I was enjoying the sledding. After about an hour without any company on the hillside, we piled back into the car and went to Jack's Diner on Central Avenue in Albany, where the clientele included several exhausted-looking city employees. I doubt they shared my affection for the weather.
Looking up from his French toast and bacon, Drew offered an observation that had the perfect construction of a Zen koan.
"I wish today was a school day," he said, "so it could be a snow day."
I knew exactly what he meant.
cseiler@timesunion.com • 454-5619