It hasn’t snowed yet in New York City this winter, and I can’t stand it. This is fake winter, as I like to call it, all the unpleasantness of the cold without any snow to distract. I know I’m probably the odd one out here, but I’m always excited for the first snowfall, and every year it comes later than the one before.

I wrote a column about this fake winter phenomenon four whole years ago, in 2019. The piece ran on Thursday, January 24, after “nine dismal weeks of rainy, 38-degree weather.” As I said then, “it doesn’t get much more disgusting than that.”

I was pretty unequivocal when I was 16. I hated to look outside and worry that everything was changing, that my winters were slipping away. Snow was nothing but a blessing then, it canceled school and set us roving free.

I can’t say snow is quite so tied to my freedom these days. I guess CUNY is a little less weather-bound than Ellenville High School was. But still, in Manhattan, 38 is a cold day, usually it’s up in the 40s. It’s like the city has moved out of the snow zone, and from now on real winter will be an anomaly.

So maybe we’re hanging up our parkas for good, maybe the winter norms are changing. But I’m in need of a good snow day. In my experience, there are few things more joyful than the day after a good storm.

Last year, we only had one big blizzard in the city, and it covered Central Park in the most beautiful white blanket I’d ever seen. Everyone was out, sledding, skating, sightseeing. I remember how brilliant the sun was, how my friend and I wandered around with hot coffees in our hands, drinking in the winter paradise. It was magic, and now I have to be prepared for the fact that it may not happen again this year.

That’s why I’m glad I got to come upstate last month to catch the snow before it melted. My roommate got COVID so I fled to my parents’ house for a few days, and I went up to Minnewaska to bask in the snowy glory. I went along the Lower Awosting Trail a ways, and it was absurdly peaceful, everything so perfectly dusted and sparkling in tiny rainbows of refracted sunlight.

In both of those instances, it rained the next day and the melting was swift. What little snow we have is now temporary.

I know there was a time when snow stayed on the ground for months, it got cold and stayed cold. I even lived a few winters like that, when I was little. Those days seem to be gone. So I have borne witness to a noticeable change.

Sometimes I take this and run with it, wondering about the collapse of civilization and things like that. Other times I just wonder about the snow days I’ll miss. On an individual level, that’s when the effects of climate change really resonate for me. Maybe I’m just being nostalgic, maybe we all are, but in Manhattan, we’re all still waiting for the snow.