It snowed in my city last week and so: the great spiritual shift has occurred. Colleagues and casual acquaintances in my New York city are usually surprised to hear of my devotion to snow—but as they say, there’s no zeal like that of the convert. I first encountered snow the winter after my mother and stepfather moved to New Hampshire, but it was Lake Erie who baptized me when I lived in Cleveland between 2011 and 2015.

To grow up in a state where a frozen birdbath makes the news and then be plunged into lake effect, having never driven in snow; never walked in it at length; never even stood in it while it was falling. My life in Cleveland was a charmed existence in many ways, but the city’s management of snow was a major feature. I never wiped out on ice there, despite walking, all told, the entire city’s circuits. I spun my car once, on an immaculately-plowed and empty post-storm interstate—my fault, not the road’s or storm’s, because I’d disobeyed the cardinal rule of winter: you must slow down.

Fortunately, no harm came of the spin, to me or anyone else.

I was a snow fiend as a child, too, due to a glut of survivalist kidlit set in Canada and Alaska. Your Julie of the Wolves, your Far North, your Hatchet, your Ice Worm, and so forth. Then there was an adult book, The Snow Walker. To this day I have no idea how or why my mother acquired a book of, purportedly, Inuit tales retold by a white Canadian for our Space Coast household. But the cover fascinated me and I got her to read it aloud to me. Its prologue, simply entitled “Snow,” is a paean to a world I had no reason to believe I would ever see.

Of course, I still have never really seen snow. The winters of Wisconsin, North Dakota, Alberta are a different beast from mine, and different again from those in the Yukon, Nunavut, Greenland.

It was a strange kind of relief to move upstate and find that even snow in northeast New York and northeast Ohio isn’t the same at all.

A lot of Americana is bound up in snow. The major winter holidays are snow-coded, even when you grow up in a place where 50-degree mornings turn out the girls in their Uggs and faux-leather jackets. Thus snow and winter have a convivial aspect, a clubby atmosphere, an assumption of merry-making, jollity, and clannishness—and that’s even without the enforced Christianity. Cultural holidays observed without the agreed-upon physical markers can create a feeling of alienation. What emotion is generated by singing “Jingle Bells” in a subtropical climate?

I get most homesick in cold weather, because the coldest days of my growing-up years stand out: that frozen birdbath. The Columbia explosion. A few frozen particles, not thick enough to be called snow, in the air one day during eleventh grade—my friends eating lunch outside in the commons yelling IT’S SNOWING, COME LOOK! To this day my Florida relations text me when unusual winter weather occurs; a few hours later, my mother texts your aunt said it snowed at home but the way she described it, it was probably small hail. I respond what if graupel? The speculations of Floridians who have been out of state for too long.

I moved my longtime LiveJournal over to Dreamwidth sometime in the late 2000s. The archive is intact, except for photos. In the “snow” tag, there are several entries from the Cleveland era filled with effusive frostmongering and little red Xes. Having come into smartphones fairly late, there’s no cloud archive from that time, either; I was never a Flickr kid. There are low-res snowy vistas scattered through my also-lengthy Tumblr archive, almost impossible to uncover. What’s left is the bare space between trees in winter, or what emerges when the snow melts—all that’s ugly (a crushed beer can, frozen dogshit) and beautiful (the first crocus). It’s not quite right to say I remember the walk across Case Western’s campus each frozen midnight, a drive through Lorain County’s placid late-winter landscape at dusk, or the Valentine’s Day snowstorm of 2015. Instead, I imagine what I’d seen when I wrote those entries, my memory augmented by desire.

Fortunately, there are a few large lakes within driving distance of me now, Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain being the mightiest. Respects may be paid. The lessons of winter may be relearned.

For your entry into the cold season, a short story. A devotion to Lake Erie in her truest modes. If you like, tell me a snow memory.