The heat is on, and I get the urge for going

I turned on the heat in the house this week.

It got to be 50 degrees in the house, I figured it was time.

Had I had an office to go to, I might have been able to delay the inevitable. But I'm a stay-at-home freelancer now so not delaying the inevitable was inevitable.

As a rule, I try to delay touching the thermostat as long as possible for two reasons:

One, the heating season here in northern New England is terribly long, about seven months from sometime in October to sometime in April. That's a long time to be paying heating bills;

Second, the physical act of turning on the heat means that pre-winter has arrived.

But here's the worst part: I may have turned the heat on a little earlier this year than I did last year.

In fact, with every year I age here in the sub-tundra the earlier I have to heat the house. I think there's an axiom that I may be able to quantify: For every year I ago, I turn the heat on five days earlier come October.

I don't know what it is about growing older that makes us less able -- mentally as well as physically -- to deal with cold. Is our blood thinner? Is our mental toughness softening?

I'm a person who through his life has looked forward to winter. I look forward to the skiing and the college hockey season. Any New Englander will tell you there's a rhythm to the seasons that gives our lives a changing landscape of not only of how things look but how they feel and smell.

For example, a McIntosh apple fresh from a tree in the fall is far superior to the McIntosh you buy in a store in July. It's a taste of the season.

But every year there's a greater battle for me to mentally prepare for the cold, snow and ice.

It's at this time of year that I thumb through my songbook of music I've collected over the year to play the Joni Mitchell song -- popularized by Tom Rush -- "Urge for Going":

I awoke today and found the frost perched on the town;

It hovered in a frozen sky and it gobbled summer down;

When the sun turns traitor cold;

And all the trees are shivering in a naked row;

I get the Urge for Going but I never seem to go.

I remember seeing a sign on Route 1 in southern Maine several years back. It was the dead of winter. The sign on the closed shop simply said: "Winter well."

Those of us who have the urge for going but never seem to go can hope for no less.

Ready for winter?

I keep trying to convince myself that I'm ready for winter.

Everything around me -- chilly mornings, falling leaves and pine needles, turning on the heat -- should be reminder enough.

But I feel like I'm owed another month or two of nice weather before the harshness of winter settles in.

I haven't forgiven Mother Nature for the mediocre summer. Despite the equinox calendar, my summer runs from Memorial Day to Labor Day. And June was a washout. Probably half of July was a washout. August was terrific.

That means my three month summer was actually only about a month and a half. Someone owes me more summer.

Which is why I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around winter.

My wife Jane and I attempted to extend our summer with a nine-day trip to Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey in late September. We baked in the sun and heat at Camden Yards in Baltimore for an Orioles-Red Sox game. And we had warm enough weather to bask on the Delaware beaches and swim in the surf. And I had great weather for a couple of rounds of golf in Delaware and New Jersey.

But while that added a week to my summer, we returned home to the beginning throes of winter.

Baseball -- the sport of summer -- is winding down. (Let's go Red Sox!) The winter sports -- football, basketball and hockey -- are spooling up.

I've put my surfing gear away for the winter; I'm not a cold-weather surfer. The golf league I play in each Tuesday has wrapped up for the season; all we have left is an 18-hole tournament this weekend.

I'm thinking ahead to the likelihood of a good ski season. I'm hoping that the Farmer's Almanac is wrong with its forecast for an unseasonably cold winter with less snowfall than average. I'd rather have the snow over the cold. The family is planning our winter pilgrimage to the North Conway, N.H., area for our annual ski vacation during the school vacation week in February.

And the family is talking who will be where for Christmas.

The winter conversation is certainly there, so it's top of mind.

But as convincing as I try to be to myself that winter is coming, my brain is still many weeks from wrapping its head around what's ahead.

Ice out means start of spring, sort of

We have a tradition up here in northern New England called "Ice Out" that is more a harbinger of spring than the equinox.

It's when the M/S Mount Washington cruise ship can navigate Lake Winnipesaukee safely between her New Hampshire ports, unimpeded by ice. "Ice Out" has an official declarer, aviator Dave Emerson who flies over the route regularly until he sees that indeed the ice is out of the lake.

For 2009, he declared "Ice Out" this past Sunday the 12th at noon.

Spring had begun ... well, maybe not yet.

My winter in southern New Hampshire was just a little longer than the winter up there a couple of hours on the lake.

For my own purposes, "Ice Out" is when the ice is totally clear of my driveway. And that didn't happen until Tuesday, April 14, at 1:45 p.m.

Granted, there's still lots of snow in certain areas. Heck, if you feel like it you can still ski late into spring and early summer, depending on the snow pack in Tuckerman Ravine (pictured here on Monday courtesy of the Mount Washington Avalanche Center). The ravine with its incredibly steep headwall is a natural bowl near the peak of Mount Washington that collects feet and feet of snow.

So, if snow and ice are the measure of winter you can find it up here for a while yet.

But now that the ice is out of my driveway my spring has sprung.

The shovels are stored in the garage and I swept a winter's worth of sand from the driveway. I took the ski rack off the roof of the car and I put the golf bag and the golf gear in the trunk. With spring in New England you never know when a golf game might break out. I've learned that you have to take it when you can get it because the golf season passes oh so quickly.

The surfboard rack will go up on the car's roof soon enough. I'm a fair weather surfer, so I need the ocean temperature to get up somewhere in the 50s before I venture in.

Right now the water temp is 42 degrees.

Trust me, it still feels like winter in the ocean and frankly it rarely feels like summer in the waters off northern New England. But we'll take what we can get.

Let's help each other winter well

I have been down this road before: Why is it that after a snowstorm, some people make the effort to fully remove the snow from their cars, while others don't?

It's those that don't to whom this rant is directed.

Wintering in northern New England is hard work. It takes some effort to winter well.

There are constants you can expect. There are the snow storms and cold snaps, of course. They challenge your ability to move from Point A to Point B, be it on foot or in a car. There is also the challenge of finding harmony in the thermostat -- you don't want to feel uncomfortably cold in the house, but you don't want all that precious, expensive fuel burning away too quickly either. You hope the car will turn over on the coldest of mornings.

You can approach winter with a certain amount of dread, in which case you won't winter well. Or you can approach winter with acceptance and perhaps with even a bit of eagerness ... to ski, snowshoe, ice skate, whatever, to take advantage of winter. That's wintering well.

What upsets me about winter, however, are the people who don't take their winter responsibilities seriously enough. And I talk specifically here about the people who don't remove fresh snowfall fully from their vehicles, especially from the roofs of their vehicles.

It drives me crazy to see people driving along the road or highway, a blizzard literally blowing behind them as snow billows from their roofs. It drives me insane when I have to follow directly behind them, sometimes in a whiteout because of all the snow that is coming from their laziness.

If someone is going to take the time and effort to brush and scrape snow from the front and rear windows before they head out, why can't they take a few more minutes to make sure the hood, the roof and the trunk are also cleared?

Sometimes these folks get as far as the hood and trunk, but then ignore the roof.

It's a nuisance when it's just snow that's billowing into you. It becomes a hazard, however, when the snow becomes ice and that ice comes flying off into someone else's windshield.

I see that a lot from cars, I see it a lot on vans and SUVs, and I see it a lot on tractor trailers. After a recent storm, while driving on the interstate, I cowered as huge sheets of ice lifted off a semi's trailer and, fortunately, splintered on the pavement, not the windshield of a car.

As much as I'm wary of the tractor trailers, I can forgive them not getting up there to clean snow. I can't forgive cars, vans or SUVs.

Part of wintering well is helping make it less miserable for others.

A half-full look ahead

The winter solstice can be seen as either a glass that's half empty or a glass that's half full.

The solstice on Dec. 21 marked the change from fall to winter. Here in northern New England it was quite a change with a severe ice storm, and a snow storm, then another snow storm following each other in quick succession over the course of 10 days.

This official start to winter tends to give some folks a dim view of what seems like a long winter slog toward spring. They don't like the cold, snow and ice. And the fact that we lost daylight saving time means most people are commuting home from work in the dark. Even the term "fall back" gives the impression that we've retreated, that the future is a glass half empty.

But here's the reason I come down on the side of half full. The days are getting longer.

I think most people lose sight of that piece of good news because that ever-so-gradual improvement gets lost in the more overwhelming consequences of winter. And this winter can give the impression of being especially dark -- the economy sucks, the job market sucks, the weather can be brutal on the psyche.

Here are a few bright spots that I'll keep in mind as we add more sunlight, about a minute a day from Dec. 21, when the sun set at 4:12 p.m.:

Inauguration Day
On Jan. 20, the sun will set at 4:41 p.m. and Barack Obama will have been sworn in as the 44th president. It is a bright spot of politics after eight years of darkness. I take the half-full view that Obama's promise of change and hope won't be lost in the history of political rhetoric.

Baseball's spring training
Red Sox pitchers and catchers report for spring training in Ft. Myers, Fla., on Feb. 16. The sun will set that day at 5:16 p.m.

Daylight Savings
We'll "spring forward" -- now doesn't that sound more optimistic? -- on Sunday, March 8. The sun sets at 6:42 p.m. that day.

May graduation
My son graduates from Boston College on Monday, May 18.The sun sets at 8:04 p.m.

Each of those events -- and certainly more along the way -- will help keep my glass half full as I make my way through the long winter months. In order to winter well around here you need a correctly filled glass.