What Makes It Winter?

Steven Popkes’s Sunday post on spring in New England inspired me to look up the temperatures in Austin for this past winter, to see if it was truly as mild as I thought it was. And it was: we had ten days where the low was at freezing or below — the lowest temperature all winter was 27 — and six days where the day’s high was below 50 (the high never got lower than 42). Most of the freezing lows were in December. No snow. No ice storms.

We gets lots of sun in the winter because our rain doesn’t...