I remember, as a child, I preferred cold weather to hot. In the blistering summers, with dry heat in the triple digits, there was no respite unless you were indoors and air conditioned. Even so, apart from that blessed blast of cool when first I came inside, my salvation was merely a relief from suffering.

I've never handled Summer heat well. Part of it is my complexion, being extremely fair and bearing the marks of the tan-less. Red hair and blue eyes are barely removed from the white hair and pink eyes of the albino. I have often joked that I'm practically transparent, I'm so white. I once fell asleep in a fishing boat and woke with a burn on my face so bad that I sported blisters for a week. The Sun of Summer has been no friend to me.

Between my allergies, which were miserable, and my penchant for sunburn, it's no surprise that I was never an outdoors person. We camped in the summers, and I was a Boy Scout, but it hardly counts. My family's idea of camping involved campers and truck hitches, not tents. My Boy Scout experiences were either indifferent or unpleasant, both in terms of the social and the wilderness experiences. And again, it's better to hike in the cold than in the heat, as long as it isn't also raining.

Cold weather, however, could be prepared for, combated, and attacked. It's a question of dressing appropriately, after all. There are always warmer clothes. And in the mornings, when the air is chill (my family believed in turning off the heater overnight, so that when it was time to emerge from toasty sheets it was as cold inside as it was out) I could always leap to the central heating dial, give it a turn and a thwack, and then stand over the floor heating vents while warm and then hot air shot up and enveloped me. Relief from the cold is not just alleviation of suffering, but pleasure itself. How different a hot shower from a cold one.

Even now, freed for the most part from my allergies and able to gauge my relationship with the sun better than I could back then, I would rather deal with winter than summer. I would rather hunker down in blankets than lay gasping and tossing even the thinnest sheets from me.

The rain may be cold and miserable, and the thought of emerging into it repellant... but the avoidance of it, the choice to remain beneath the sheets, to continue the hibernation for a few extra hours is pleasure enough on days like these.