Earlier this month, I picked my girls up from elementary school, drove north from our town in western Massachusetts, and hoped that we would eventually get to winter.

Although it was mid-February, the ground was bare at our house, and the nearby ponds fully liquid. There had been no sledding, and our one sad attempt at a snowball fight earlier in the year had ended once eager mittens had scraped away the thin layer of white.  

As the Monitor’s climate reporter, I know better than to confuse “weather” with “climate,” let alone the global warming caused by humans. This winter has been warm in the Northeast. Next year might be cold. 

But there is something disheartening here about no snow in February, and the trend overall is unmistakable. According to the nonprofit research group Climate Central, 238 locations in the United States experienced an average winter warming of 3.3 degrees Fahrenheit between 1970 and 2022. New England is warming even faster, with Burlington, Vermont, increasing by 7.1 degrees and Concord, New Hampshire, by 6 degrees.

There are myriad implications of this shift – scientific, biological, economic. But there is also something emotional. 

It took us an hour and a half in the car and about 300 feet of elevation to find winter.

Lake Morey, in Fairlee, Vermont, had just frozen solid enough for us to join a group of friends who gather every year to venture onto its 4.3-mile skate trail, advertised as the longest in the U.S. The scene is joyous, with children swirling and laughing, and adults playing without a smartphone in sight.

We gathered together by the frozen shores, and a number of parents shared our relief that there was actually ice. We wondered how long our kids would be able to continue this tradition, but mostly we were grateful. 

I remembered what Adam Cramer, the CEO of the advocacy group Outdoor Alliance, told me for an upcoming piece. Hope, he says, “arises from the personal connection one has to a place.”