Enough with the snow already. I'm wearing out the treads on my snowblower and my wife has gone through two snow shovels so far.

We're fortunate that we don't have any young kids anymore. I can see them having school until July this year. With the Olympics over, there is nothing much to look forward to on the television until spring training and the start of baseball season.

Being born and raised in Connecticut my affection for the change of seasons was natural. I never cared for the thought of moving to Florida or some other warm weather locale. But as I grow older, I'm thinking more and more that this idea of the stalwart New Englander is fast losing its charm. The past couple of winters have been unusually harsh and the thought of global warming seems to have changed to global cooling. There is something happening to our usual weather patterns.

Several of our friends have moved to Florida and South Carolina in their retirement years but even they have experienced colder winter months in their new locales.

I know the population of Georgia, having virtually no experience in driving in the snow, was recently thrown for a loop with traffic congestion and highway accidents. In New England we are confronting the shortage of road salt at the same time that most towns exceed their budgets for road clearing and maintenance.

Now, to look on the bright side of things, the youngsters have a chance to experience the king of old-fashioned winters that we used to enjoy, with sledding, ice skating and snowball fights.

I remember coming in the house after an all-day session out in the snow, sledding down the hill on Avery Lane, and shoveling out the elderly neighbor next door to earn 50 cents. Can you imagine asking a kid nowadays to do anything for 50 cents? First of all, if it is not green and does not fold in the middle they probably would not recognize it as legal money.

By the way, 50 cents was the price of a large grinder, can you believe it? But anyway, I digress. After coming in for a cup of hot chocolate and dry clothes, we would gather in the living room for a game of Monopoly, as we hadn't as yet purchased our first television set and the individual video games and iPods were far in the future. Our wet clothes would be hung over the floor furnace grate. There was one main vent in the center of the house that heated the entire home, before my father converted the heating system to baseboard heat years later. You could stand on that vent and get immediate relief from the piercing cold that had permeated our bodies. But even in the harshest days, like the mail, the weather didn't stop the bread man and the milkman from their deliveries. I remember when they delivered the milk in bottles you would find the cap two inches above the top of the bottle lifted off by the frozen cream that rose to the top. That was a treat like ice cream for the first one to retrieve the milk bottles.

Another difference I notice from those long ago days, is that I now don't just come back in from the cold with a runny nose, but I also feel my arthritis throughout my entire skeletal framework, from my neck to my back, to my knees. It is at that time that I wish I could find that neighborhood kid that would shovel our drive for 50 cents! Alas, those days are gone.

TOM PERKINS IS A RETIRED ADVERTISING EXECUTIVE WHO LIVES IN WATERFORD. EMAIL HIM AT TNGPERK@SBCGLOBAL.NET.