I wrote a column last year about how summer had gone from my favorite to least favorite season.

That change was largely the consequence of two factors: retiring from teaching (summer no longer meant "school's out") and having spent way too many summers in a place, Arkansas, whose geography seemed to dictate an unrelenting combination of wet blanket southeast and blazing desert southwest.

Alas, as the latest is about to end, according to the calendar, I've begun to believe that Arkansas winters might be nearly as bad in their own way as our summers.

When I was growing up in northern Illinois, we didn't think much at all about winter, we just accepted and endured it (much like we endure Arkansas summers). It would start to get cold well before Halloween and the first snow usually hit before Thanksgiving, with the stuff staying on the ground, periodically and abundantly replenished, until April.

We adapted to winter every year gradually and thus fully. Nobody paid much attention to weather forecasts because winter days were usually the same and, if different, just worse.

Snow and cold didn't make life grind to a halt—I still recall shoveling snow off the basketball courts across the street whenever we wanted to shoot hoops (the heart of basketball season coming, inconveniently, in winter) and going out at halftime of the "Ice Bowl" (the 1968 Super Bowl in Green Bay between the Packers and my beloved Cowboys) to play football in the snow when it was 10 below.

We hardly ever seemed to have snow days, and until we got driver's licenses, just about every kid I knew walked to school whatever the weather.

My working-class family wasn't the kind to take winter vacations in Florida, so the closest we got to anything warm was watching the Rose Bowl on New Year's. To the contrary, our only winter getaways were trips up to the cottage on Lake Wisconsin, where it was, if anything, even colder, and where we rode snowmobiles and dragged homemade sleds out onto the frozen lake to go ice fishing, possibly the dumbest activity in the history of the world.

When I got out of grad school, I made two pledges: to never spend another winter in Illinois and to never live in a place where people knew how to drive in the snow.

I've been able to keep the first pledge and violated for only a short time the second; leaving sunny Alabama to teach at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania quickly made me realize I'd made a mistake and should head back south, which turned out to be here.

My first reaction to my first winter in Arkansas was "you call this winter?" and I stubbornly refused to buy any kind of winter coat for years because it would have been a tacit admission that I hadn't moved far enough southward after all.

I don't scoff at Arkansas winters anymore, though, as I've gradually come to realize that they are just as problematic, albeit in different ways, as the Illinois and Wisconsin winters of my youth.

If winters up there were a constant—same old, same old cold and snow every day—the problem with winters here is that they are anything but, the sheer variability making it impossible to fully adjust one's system and behavior and even clothing.

Thirty-five degrees seems colder than 20 degrees when two days before the 35 it was 75 and you were out playing golf in shorts. Along those lines, a peek at the Weather Channel forecast tells me that the high will be 70 the day before (Sunday) this column appears, and the low 30 (such a 40-degree difference over barely 12 hours might be "normal" only for Arkansas).

Although I don't remember my parents ever altering travel plans because of winter weather, or even taking it much into account, I've now also learned that it is risky to try to plan trips from here anytime in January or February. This year's nasty January blizzard forced us to reschedule an excursion to New York lest we come home to burst pipes in our poorly insulated 120-year-old money-pit.

The problem with Arkansas winters, then, is that you have no way of knowing what you're going to get from week to week, even day to day. You start to think you've avoided the worst when you get to mid-January (like this year), only to then get clobbered with bitter cold and snow that sticks around long enough to close the schools for a week (like this year).

By the time the last of that snow dump finally melts, the house is getting kind of stuffy and you turn on the ceiling fans and even think about switching on the AC. People up north shake their heads when you tell them that people down here sometimes run heat in the morning and AC in the afternoon in March.

When I was growing up, I used to get used to winter; in Arkansas I never can.

The only consolation is when I talk to my youngest son up in Chicago and find out that, whatever it is here, it's 25 degrees colder there.

Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

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