Feb 9, 2017 3 min read

This is how much I dislike winter.

Last week, on Groundhog Day, I tuned in to the live feed from Punxsutawney to see what Phil had to report. I really wanted to see what he had to say, as if he were a meteorologist with any scientific insight whatsoever about when spring will arrive.

I was hanging my hopes on a rodent.

Except for the decade or so in my 20s when I enjoyed skiing, I have always loathed winter. The snow that fell here Wednesday night was pretty and all, but it gets in the way, and I’m not confident driving in it. That’s me puttering along in the right-hand lane.

My favorite week of every year is that one in late March or early April – those mornings when I walk out the door into warm sunshine, feeling lighter. The winter tarp is peeled back, and everything’s in color again.

I first started consulting the groundhog in high school, when winter brought long, dark bus rides to school. By mid-January I’d had enough of the clanking of the tire chains along the back roads where we lived and the grinding of gears as we sloshed our way up Ginger Hill.

By Feb. 2, I’d look toward Gobbler’s Knob, fingers crossed, hoping this would be the year without the shadow. As if that event had any real connection to the weather. Those were the days before cellphone calls, and I recall bursting through the door at the end of the day, asking my parents, “So what did the groundhog say?”

I don’t remember a time, back then, when he didn’t see the shadow. With each passing year, Feb. 2 brought the shadow, the news reports about it, and my bitter disappointment.

I’d forgotten this, but Phil did not cast a shadow last year. And it turns out he was wrong about the early spring. In March, I took a bicycle trip to the Great Allegheny Passage, and had to turn around after a few miles because my eyeballs froze.

We snow haters have been lucky this year. My son, the snowboarder, has been happy to see the little bits of snow that have fallen. He wishes for the blizzards, and I yell at him to stop it.

The ugly aftermath of this latest storm will come tomorrow, when the snow that the plows have pushed to the sides of roads will be covered in cinders. Grimy heaps of it mar the grocery store parking lot.

That’s what winters look like in my memory, the gray-black slush. A student in my university writing class described it as “charcoal snow.” I put a red star next to that on her paper. It’s perfect: February brings the charcoal snow.

Phil saw his shadow last week, of course, meaning we’ll have six more weeks of winter. Six weeks from now puts us around the middle of March. I’ve made an appointment that week for my annual bike tune-up. The tires get flat in the cold of the shed, and the brakes get cranky.

I plan to ride my bike on the first day of spring. A ride March 20 might be pushing it, but I’m only going on what Phil says. Of course, he’s been wrong before.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.