I have a confession to make.
Winter weather, snow, follows me.
Fortunately, it doesn’t happen in the summer months but it is pretty much a constant when winter begins.
This past February, I drove to Florida.
A friend let Terri and I use her condominium for the months of February and March and we, gladly, took her up on the offer.
The plan was for me to drive down with all of our clothes and Terri would fly a few days later.
I don’t fly anywhere that I can drive since having a knee replacement a little over ten years ago.
It wasn’t the marathons and road races that did me in or even the sixty or so miles I ran each week.
No, like a moron, I took up skiing at the age of forty-nine.
During my second season, I fell, got up the wrong way and that was the end of my right medial meniscus.
I went bone on bone for another ten years until I couldn’t stand it anymore and had the knee replaced.
Now, if I go to the airport, I set off the metal detector and TSA assumes they have found the second coming of Osama Bin-Laden.
The friendly skies of United aren’t that friendly anymore, so I drive.
I snuck out of town on the 1st of February and winter didn’t notice because a Nor’easter hit after I was gone.
Poor Terri was faced with plowing out several times a day just to get to the barn to feed her menagerie.
When I arrived in Florida, the weather was beautiful and warm but, as usually happens, the temperatures got cooler there and the snow stopped here as the temperatures started to climb.
This is not some paranoid weather fantasy, I have a proven track record.
A number of years ago, Terri decided that we would get away from the winter and made travel plans for us to visit New Mexico.
It was pleasant when we arrived in Albuquerque, much cooler when we made it to Santa Fe and we arrived in Taos in time for a snow storm.
A couple years later, I proposed renting a place in Florida for a couple of weeks.
Terri is not a big fan of Florida since she lived there for a year and found it too flat, hot and humid. My entreaties that it would be different in the winter fell on deaf ears.
“Can’t you find another warm weather destination?” she asked me.
The light went on in my head. I am a graduate of the University of Tennessee and I recalled how my friends raved about the Gulf Coast of Mississippi.
I rented a beach house on the Gulf just outside Ocean City, Mississippi a few miles from Gulf Port.
When you walked out the front door, you were feet from the Gulf water.
We were there two days, when it snowed.
We were told that it was the first time it had snowed on the Gulf Coast in one-hundred and seventy-five years.
Of course it was.
In the aftermath of that experience, I have toyed with the idea of visiting Hawaii or Cuba to see if it will snow there.
I have since vacationed in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and Asheville, North Carolina in March where the snow dutifully arrives during my stay. It’s not much but there is always some.
Not long after I arrived in Florida, the temperatures started to cool.
It seemed imperceptible to me but the natives remarked how unusual it was.
Terri arrived a week after me and we had a great time.
She flew home after ten days and the plan was for her to come back in the middle of March.
The day after she left, my daughter, Kate, and her husband, Ben, arrived for five days.
We had a lot of fun, went to the beach, took a dolphin cruise and ate out every night.
The weather was pleasant but it was still too cold to swim in the ocean.
You’re probably wondering did it snow.
It didn’t.
After Terri returned home, she discovered our two old dogs missed her so much that she couldn’t bring herself to leave them in March.
A week later Kate and Ben left, I decided to cut my stay in Florida short and return home.
Florida was fun but I missed Terri.
I took three days to drive home and the weather got progressively cooler.
I saw my first snow in southern Pennsylvania.
A day after I arrived home we had another Nor’easter.
They are forecasting another for next week.
Yes, I brought it with me.
If you are sick and tired of it, I have a suggestion.
Start a Go Fund Me page and I’ll go wherever you send me until spring.