A good fifteen years or more, during one of those balmy winters we enjoyed, the ones where spring had well and truly arrived by mid-February, my father stopped by one Saturday as I worked in the yard in shorts and a tee-shirt. He had his rounds and I was somewhere between coffee with his pals and bean soup at the VFW.

“If this is global warming, I think I might be in favor of it,” he said. He was no longer the fellow who was so hot-natured that you couldn’t buy him long-sleeved shirts, much less a nice sweater for Christmas, and had become that old man, decked out like all the other old men, looking identical in their flat caps, golf sweaters and corduroys, no mater the time of year.

But even Daddy in those days would not have known what to make of the summer we just survived, the summer the entire world seemed to experience. He might not even have noticed, as I barely did, because when it was hot my mother would have kept him indoors and would have hidden the OMU bills from him.

I am enjoying the change in temperature, even thought it is overcast and a little humid. When I can’t get out into the day, I manage to stick my head outside a couple of times and breathe in…what? Can one breathe in the cool, actually? Maybe. I can experience it for the delivery it is but I am keeping my powder dry as it pertains to any predictions for winter.

My favorite weather expert remains Ryan Hall. He cautions us not s nerding out over the extreme predictions about El Niño year. He cautions us not to read too much into what he or others say this far out, but all indications point to something significant occurring this winter.

But just where, and how much and what, exactly–well, that remains to be seen.

And, don’t we kind of prefer that? At least a little bit?

My mother tells the story of driving to Henderson for the annual Thanksgiving Day football rivalry between Owensboro High School and Henderson High, leaving the house in a short-sleeved dress and thin sweater, the weather unseasonably warm.

It starts snowing at half-time and by the time she and her beau, my father, drove home, the fields were covered in several inches of snow and they couldn’t see the road. Once in the city limits, there were six inches on the ground.

My father dropped her at home on Triplett Street, right where the old hospital used to sit. He drove the car home, with it being my grandmother’s and her being persnickety.

He then walked back to my mother’s house from Hill Ave. in the snow, and their date continued until he was shooed off, around eleven, and he turned around and reversed the trip.

I am not much for romance, and neither were my parents, I don’t think. But I love this story, the youthful ardor of it, the handsome young man walking all that way, collar up against the snow, head down, hands in his pockets. My mother waiting for him looking out her front window, and wondering would he actually make that journey, and ooh, yes. Look. There he is, emerging like a developing photograph through the white and white and whiteness of snow, a dream, and even better, not a dream.

We are smack dab in the uncertainty zone for winter weather this year. We might have a mild, barely there winter, shirt sleeves in February, a happy jump on tomato season come April.

Or we might be buried under buckets of snow. I’m hoping for at least one surprise, that morning we wake up and without even opening the blinds we know something big happened overnight.

Or like that away game eighty years ago, something monumental, memorable, like the thing that caught my parents by surprise, caught thousands of people by surprise, but really, in their beautiful youth, it only happened to them, for them.