On Jan. 3 last winter, The Day published pictures of a rescue that took place on the pond at the Connecticut College Arboretum, when a teenager fell through the ice.

The teen had ventured with some friends out on to the frozen pond, thinking they could make it to a rock out in the middle.

Turns out it wasn't that cold, yet.

Then, on Jan. 7, the paper ran a picture on the front page of a sixth-grader in New London tasting a snowflake on his tongue. More snow showers, like the one the youngster was enjoying, were in the forecast that day.

But no serious snow came.

By Jan. 16, there was a picture on the front page of someone ice-fishing on Gorton Pond in East Lyme. There was ice but no snow on the pond.

It has to be very cold for a long time before you can safely ice-fish here.

So, here were are now, one year later, close to the middle of January, and there is no ice in sight.

Indeed, we have barely had freezing weather, hardly enough to put a skim on a bucket of water.

Our one slushy light snow hardly produced enough for even the most enterprising among us to capture a cold flake on the tongue.

By Jan. 27 last year, the very cold winter of 2015 abruptly became the very cold and snowy winter, with a two-day blizzard that dropped around 2 feet around here. And then, as we all remember so well, it kept coming and coming, with regular storms and little respite from the bitter cold.

We have escaped the severe cold so far this winter.

Can we expect a dry or snowless one, too? Or should we worry that a late January blizzard like the one that sucked us into a snow belt last year is just around the corner?

At the risk of jinxing things, I am going to venture a prediction siding with the experts, who seem to be coalescing, now that we are well into winter, around a long-term forecast of a warmer and less snowy winter than usual.

I can't vouch for anything as scientific as aching bones, but I'd say it feels like one of the those shoreline winters of old, when you might never need to fetch the shovel from the barn, never mind that snowblower you bought last year.

Until last week, my grass was still green.

I read where Macy's blames this winter's slow sales on the weather, with no one buying puffy coats or gloves and scarves. People I know who earn money shoveling and plowing look grim lately, while the rest of us cheer the warm weather.

Remember when you couldn't find rock salt anywhere? Remember ice dams? I'm not sure I had ever heard of an ice dam before last winter.

By now, the Old Farmer's Almanac has already been discredited

Their forecast for last week for this region was snow, then flurries, then very cold. Their below-normal cold forecast for the first part of January was certainly far off the mark.

The meteorologists were closer to the mark early on in the forecasting season, suggesting this year's significant El Niño was going to make for a warmer and less snowy winter in the Northeast.

Even the simpler extended forecasts are starting to look very rosy, unless you make money with a snowplow.

Accuweather, with its extended forecast for New London, shows weeks and weeks of high temperatures above freezing stretching on into March. Even when snow appears in that extended forecast, it is followed by more warm temperatures.

I know it seems sometimes a little too strange. Daffodils were popping up in my yard at Christmas.

But if you aren't planning a Caribbean vacation anytime soon, and you didn't win Powerball last week, a winter without shoveling might work out to be a pretty good consolation.

Besides, in no time at all we will be able to complain about the hot weather again.

This is the opinion of David Collins

d.collins@theday.com

Twitter: @DavidCollinsct