After the last two weeks, when the South has been locked in the deepfreeze, I’m beginning to rethink my life-long love of cold weather.

Don’t get me wrong. For an authentic son of the South, I have always had a peculiar relationship with cold weather. I love being in the cold, but I don’t like being cold. What I like, beyond all reason, is being out in the cold, but bundled up enough to keep the icy winds at bay, to be warm and at least semi-comfy even when the world around me is frosty. It’s a deep-seated feeling, an atavistic thing from my Viking ancestors. In my earliest childhood memories, I distinctly remember the wonderful feeling of watching the Geminid meteor showers each December, bundled up in the backyard with my Dad. We’d be hunkered down wrapped in quilts and watching the icy winter sky to see meteors streak across the heavens – like God’s own frozen fireworks sent to earth just for our amazement.

Strong in my memory too, are the nights Dad and I spent camping, first with the YMCA Indian Guides, then Scouts, wrapped in our war-surplus sleeping bags, those olive-drab, down-filled mummy bags that covered everything but eyeballs and nose. No cold could get to me in my little cocoon, safe with Dad nearby, until we had to get up and stumble to the campfire to warm first our fronts, then our backsides, and repeat.

One of the most delicious memories was camping with my Scout troop at Cloudland Canyon State Park in north Georgia, going to sleep in the cold and waking up covered with a fresh snowfall. Dad was back at home recovering from his first heart attack and wasn’t with us then, and I remember just busting to get home and tell him about it.

Part of the fantasy, I think, came from hearing stories from my older brother Charlie. He was an Army corpsman in the Korean War, and struggled to survive the bitter winters as much as the waves of Chinese soldiers. He could talk about the cold, but not about the killing. Could I have withstood the bitter, killing cold like my heroic big brother? Each night in the freezing weather helped me get closer, perhaps, to answering that unanswerable question.

Of course, I’ve passed on, to some degree, my proclivity for enjoying cold weather to my sons. We’ve bundled up to watch meteor showers, hike and camp in the cold, and play in the snow whenever we could find it. There were limits, though. My younger son, also a Charlie, declined to go camping one night in the Rockies with me and his older brother Philip, just because there was three feet of snow on the ground. He must have gotten his sanity from his mother’s side.

But recently, after two weeks of sub-freezing days and nights, the fun has nearly worn off. I’m a little tired of sweaters and heavy coats, and the icy winds that cut to the bone in every spot that’s not well-covered. I’m looking forward to springtime and warm sunshine, almost like normal people. Maybe I’ve even outgrown my weird winter ways.

Yeah, maybe, but I doubt it. I know deep in my heart that the very next time it gets bitterly cold I’ll be out there bundled against it, even when I could be warm inside. The temporary sanity of practical adulthood will always lose out to the real me, challenging the cold, but snug with memories of Daddy warm in my heart.