I have a sadistic attachment to New England weather.

When you spend as much time in Tucson as I have you start to take it for granted that the sun will always be shining. Although the temperature has made it a tad brisker here as of late the sun still, almost lackadaisically, spreads an even coat of illumination upon this corner of the American southwest.

When I made a trip back to New England for Thanksgiving break I was rudely made aware that the weather there bares no resemblance to anything you experience in Arizona. As if to pay me back for all the blissful days I had spent drenched in sunshine while at the University of Arizona the second I landed at Bradley International Airport Connecticut wrapped me in dense, fierce fog, as if welcoming me with a cold embrace.

Winter fog in Connecticut is nothing like summer fog by the way, which is more of a gentle mist that politely falls upon you. Walking through a summer fog is much like taking a stroll through an absent minded cloud that has drifted too close to the ground. No, winter fogs are thick, tense, impersonal affairs, their wisps of icy smoke enveloping everything they touch like a miasma. The cold pricks at you, seethes in-between your layers of clothing, drains your life force from wherever your skin is exposed to the air. This is the kind of weather that greeted me as soon as I made my way out of the airport terminal.

New England winters were one of the things I was trying to escape when I decided to come to Tucson. Every time I find myself back on the east coast during the winter months I'm reminded why. The cold is pervasive, relentless, forever trying to blot out warmth wherever it finds refuge. The sky remains in an almost perpetual state of gray, as if color itself has been erased with the change in the seasons. Even when the sun does break through the clouds it seems bleak, washed-out, exhausted from trying to reach into the northern latitudes.

Dreary as it is, during the few days I was home I found it to be strangely comforting. You expect nothing from this kind of weather. It has no sympathy for you. There is nothing pretentious about it, no formalities, no niceties. It clings to the buildings, trees, and roadways with equal amounts of disdain and aloofness. It neither progresses nor recedes--it simply and always is there, everywhere.

You don't get that with ordinary sunshine.