Italian filmmaker, Fredrico Fellini, in his film Amarcord, playfully uses youthful memories to exaggerate the past. His characters move through a city square in trenches up to their necks in snow. The image reminds me of my own winters growing up in Michigan during the 1950s and 60s and makes me question the size of the drifts in those memories.
It’s a mistake to equate local weather with global warming, I know. But those of us “of an age” feel something in our bones. Winters are milder than in the past and seem to come later. Our first “real” snowstorm this winter was the 26th of January. Really? This “storm” in my youth would not have qualified as a storm, but rather just “a snow.”