This may sound crazy, but tonight, when it is 9 p.m. and 55 degrees outside, I am feeling just the tiniest bit of what can only be classified as Weather Guilt.

It’s not that I’ve been driving a Hummer or using up way more than my share of the ozone–it’s just that I’ve been enjoying the fact that we’re not getting a winter here.

Really enjoying it, in fact. Like cartwheels and dancing in the driveway kind of enjoying.

Here we’re in a situation where glaciers are melting and polar bears are signing themselves up for the endangered species list, and Al Gore is shaking his head in disgust, but nevertheless, here I am walking around outside on January 5 in short sleeves, thinking, “Whoo! I could get used to this!” And, “I wonder if it could get even slightly warmer and then I could go to the beach…”

I have always thought that people shouldn’t have to suffer from weather. In fact, when I first moved to New England from Southern California, I was shocked that first year to realize that February wasn’t one of the spring months. I was okay with putting up with the white Christmas thing and, okay, a month of snow after that…but by February, I instinctively knew that everything was supposed to be in bloom.

“No, no,” everyone told me. “February is the very worst of it. Brace yourself for blizzards.”

And blizzards we had that year–through February, March, most of April, and one dangling one in May. People told me that’s just the way it is here.

The year after that spring managed to poke its head up just slightly early–maybe arriving in April instead of May–and a new friend of mine sighed and said, “I just feel so guilty when spring comes early. It’s like I haven’t suffered through enough winter and I don’t deserve spring yet.”

I gave a little speech about how we weren’t meant to suffer, we earthlings. The Earth was supposed to be a hospitable planet. Weather wasn’t something you deserved.

And I would have stuck to that opinion, too, and been totally happy with the buds bursting out on my bushes in early January this year…except today when I was reading the entire Internet, I came across this essay from The Science Creative Quarterly, a first-person essay from an actual melting glacier, and–well, I actually have started to feel a little something.

The glacier says:

Dear humans everywhere:

People. I’m melting. I’m actually melting.

Really now, don’t you care about us glaciers anymore? Personally, I’m not that fond of tourists on cruises, but hey, I’m just doing my job. It’s not like we pretty ourselves up for nothing. We matter. I’m mean, one minute, you’re like “ooh, cool, look at my heart-shaped ice cube in my heart-shaped martini glass” and the next, you’re like installing 17,000 Christmas lights in your front porch.

And what’s up with all these SUVs? I mean, don’t get me wrong, they are cool and all, but seriously why so many? I understand that some individuals may actually need an SUV to do that all-terrain stuff – to, you know, ride over places like my sorry backside. But what about the average North American family with their 1.86 kids? Unless maybe it’s because these folks actually need the 12 cup holders that come standard with these vehicles. Man, that would be a lot of caffeine, although I guess looking after kids is pretty tiring stuff.”

See? Now I feel I should be rooting for snow once again.