With eight years of experience of winter in my section of the North Carolina mountains, you’d have thought I’d seen every version of cold this section of country could offer.

It ain’t so.

There’s cold and then there’s 2025 cold. So, yea, it’s been cold this year and cold during the tail end of 2024. Lots of cold to go around.

North Dakota cold.

But maybe some of it is my older bones. The late 70s tug on a man the way the late 60s haven’t yet learned about. In your late 60s, given a bit of luck, you occasionally can feel young and even carefree.

I can’t remember the last time I felt carefree.

My motorcycle hasn’t been out of the basement in two months, and, looking ahead, I don’t see a day on my calendar with temps anywhere near warm enough to break that gloomy streak.

You gotta account for sickness in all that. For 23 days I wallowed in the Asheville hospital with a collapsed heart, a superbug infection that go-carted through my blood like freaks on Fentanyl. I had the flu, the blues and no appetite.

I came out the other end weighing 20 pounds less than when I went in, battered, beaten, bruised. Alive.

Life. It’s a pisser.