Winter in Athens

I hate everything about cold weather. I mean it. It hasn't always been that way. When I was a kid, I couldn't wait for it to snow enough for school to be canceled. I grew up in Lexington, KY, so school was called off for snow at least once or twice a year.

When I was in grade school, we had really bad winters a couple of years in a row. It snowed so much that cars were not able to get up the hill near our house. Some of the neighborhood kids had sleds--big clunky sleds with wooden slats, steel runners, and an alleged turning device. We sledded down that hill all day for several days. It was a blast and I didn't care that it was frigid cold.

The next really bad winter came the year after I got my driver's license. I had a Chevy Vega at the time. It was parked on the street which had virtually no traffic. The snow was so deep that the car just wouldn't move. That's when my dislike for cold weather really started to settle in.

Winters at the University of Kentucky solidified any negative feelings about cold weather into a solid wall of hate. Trudging across campus in a foot of snow with sub-zero temperatures and wind gusts of unknown magnitude isn't fun, no matter how you cut it. The university rarely closed because the majority of students lived on or around campus. I was in the unfortunate minority that commuted in from the burbs, unless of course my car was snowed in at my parents house.

Today it's a balmy 70 degrees in Athens. It's unseasonably warm, but the fact that a 70 degree day is possible in January is why I love winter in Athens. Yeah, I know it's going to get cold. But it will only last for a few days before we have another unseasonably warm day. If this is winter, I'll take it!