The easy answer is the fact that the source of cold air this winter tended to be more in Eurasia and not North America. So what we got was more Pacific air and not Arctic air.

Nothing burns like the cold.

Though Anne was born in Alabama and schooled in Mississippi, she had traveled North, and, like many Southerners, gained a theoretical understanding of the concept of cold. But the mind is an overprotective parent. What it doesn't care for, it hides. Like many inhabiting the subtropics, Anne had repressed the reality of subzero mercury.

It's not the coldest place, but it has a sure cold. And unlike the coldest places, it also has a sure snow cover.

I don't know if we feel guilty, but we certainly feel as if it's the first year we've cancelled winter. We've gone years without summer, but never winter.

In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold.