"Oh, the snow, the beautiful snow, filling the sky and earth below, over the housetops, over the street, over the heads of the people you meet. Dancing, flirting, skimming along. Beautiful snow! It can do no wrong."

So wrote Michigan poet J. W. Warren in 1870 about the hexagonal ice crystals of which snowmen, snow angels, snowscapes, blizzards and killer avalanches are composed, on which ski bums, snow bunnies, tobogganers and people on sleds frolic, which paralyze whole cities and occasionally emancipate children from dear old golden rule days.

This is being written in mid-February by one who is garbed in a sport shirt, shorts and Birkenstock sandals in an air conditioned home under a ceilingless blue sky, about as far from snow as alley cats are from celibacy.

When Firstwife and I moved our octet of begats from what we regarded as the frozen winter wasteland of Philadelphia, we were warned that we'd miss the "change of seasons," which turned out to be partially true. We have missed - that is to say not experienced - countless days and nights of biting cold, weeks on end of gray skies, and, yes, the aforenoted hexagonal ice crystals, which usually morphed into slush, then ice, then a catalyst for the mud that followed the thaw, like environmental hangovers.

Our wee folk, of course, welcomed it and delighted in suiting up for outdoor fun and games, interrupted with annoying frequency by the need to be partially disrobed for piddling purposes and/or nose wipes.

For us ancestors, it was mostly slipping, skidding, shivering, shoveling, shuttering, hunkering down and wistfully waiting for the sight of that first robin of spring.

In balance, it was a change of season that we had little trouble abandoning.

Mind you, I have nothing against winter, since so many of my fellowpersons find pleasure in it, but my personal view is that if God and/or Mother Nature had intended humans to live in so harsh a clime, one or t'other of them would have equipped our bodies with all-over fur, as was done in the case of polar bears and other hirsute critters.

I find it curious that, while hordes of North Americaners squirrel away their spare bucks or max out their plastic in order to spend some wintertime in the Sunbelt, we have thriving colonies of local masochists who annually trek up yonder to the winter wonderlands.

Once there, even more remarkably, they are wont to strap slippery slats on their feet and hurtle down mountainsides in the face of icy winds, with reckless disregard for life or limb. They say it's fun, and in deference to both their obvious sincerity and my congenital cowardice, I'll take their words for it. (I cut the same slack, incidentally, for bungee jumpers, aficionados of Russian Roulette and those who engage in extramarital larks, but I have considerably less than a burning desire to engage in such diversions.)

That this disparity in personal preference is a hidden blessing is borne out by the fact that the bitter cold up yonder (part of the highly vaunted "change of seasons," one must assume) drives downward those legions of snowbirds whose monetary spoor helps to keep my adopted Florida green and happily free of personal income tax.

Do I not mind the blistering heat of tropical summers? Well, admittedly I might, except for two mitigating factors:

First off, our homes, cars, stores and gathering places are all climate-controlled, so we're exposed to high temperature and humidity only for brief periods of time and extended periods of recreation, during which we have appropriate wardrobe options or degrees of undress.

Then, during the July-October period, when it is somewhat more difficult to avoid discomfort, I have in recent years undertaken a full-time research project on the variant lifestyle in New Hampshire, whence snow and cryogenic atmospheres have taken temporary leave. At the present time, buried as it is under a blanket of you-know-what, it has all the appeal to me of a fierce physical thrashing.

I'm sensitive enough, though, to be moved by a Bing Crosby rendition of "White Christmas" and appreciative of paintings, photos and travelogues depicting alpine scenes, winter sports and the like, but I prefer seeing them on a screen, in an album or on picture postcards from change-loving kith and kin.

Otherwise, count me among those thin-blooded humanoids who agree with Carl Reiner that snow is "a totally unnecessary freezing of water."