Lost Winter

Its less then two weeks until Christmas, and its just now starting to feel a bit like winter. It came up so quietly. I look out my open window and I see leaves on trees, feel a warm breeze pass by. One out of ten trees are bare, and that isn't even counting the evergreens. Most still cling to a bright golden covering, thinning but still very present. I feel like Fall just kept on falling and falling. Will true winter just pass us by this year? Its somehow a very depressing thought. I hope winter is just running a bit late, maybe half way to California it remembered it forgot all the snow and hand to turn around. I hope it comes back.
I think about all of my wintery feelings, and realize most are artificial. I'm entranced by a smattering of decorations and lights, but its better then nothing. It still makes me happy to see them. I drove by city hall today and saw the one mother with her child trying to skate through the melting slush they laid out. I applaud their determination and sheer bloody mindedness. I'm sure its the mothers doing, doggedly trying to give her son a memory of Christmas that fit with her own childhood joy. I wonder where she was from? Somewhere cold I think, somewhere in the real world. I keep coming to this thought, like there is something wrong... Something wrong with here. Like a "normal" place to live would have snow, and rain. And storms, real ones, ones that we talk about in a sentence with out the word fire in it. A place with forests and trees and rolling green hills. For most of the year the hills are just covered in sad brown grass, mostly dead. The odd small bushes, squat and prickly and uninviting. I have fond childhood memories of cacti and dust.
I can trace my bloodlines back to Sweden. A cold and harsh place, but also one of unsurpassed beauty. After my ancestors crossed the ocean, they settled in Minnesota and Wisconsin. They chose there because it was just like home, cold harsh and beautiful. I feel out of place here when I think about it. I keep reminding myself that we in the west only consider things like snow and rain as normal because that's the European normal. That maybe even a large percentage of the human population lives areas like here. But I keep coming back to the fact that in the greater picture, I am an out of place European. I am one of the first few generations to strike out to a radically new place. In the big picture, I am but a dot at the end of a long line that stretches back thousands of years. Is that were all these feelings come from?