Winter weather is just the worst.

Snow is fun, so long as you don’t have to drive too far in it. It’s the other stuff — the ice, sleet and freezing rain like we saw this week — that stinks. It’s enough to make you long for the brutal heat of a Mississippi summer.

I grew up in New Jersey (yes, I’m a native Yankee, although I’m fast approaching the point where I’ve been down here longer than I was up there), but never have enjoyed winter like Southerners think I should. It’s a big part of the reason I moved down here. It has given me some good war stories, though.

I remember hunkering down during the “Superstorm” of March 1993, a winter hurricane that stretched from Maine to Cuba. We got about 20 inches of snow in Jersey, topped by an inch or two of ice.

During it, I saw one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. As I looked out at the wind-blown snow, a small bird alit on the sill of my upstairs window. He sat there for a minute, shaking some snow out of his feathers, while I watched in amazement. A few moments later he took off back into the storm, never to be seen again.

I always wondered what happened to that bird. Hopefully he lived a long and happy life doing fun birdy things.

A few years later we got the “Blizzard of ‘96” that dumped nearly two feet of snow on us.

Shoveling that was brutal, since you had to do each patch four times — once to break through the top layer of ice; two shovelfuls to get the bulk of the snow; and one final push to scoop up the final inch or two that was packed down onto the sidewalk. All of that work cleared one or two sidewalk squares.

We lived on a main street, and one of my neighbors had a Ford Escort that had been buried by the plows. I could see the car’s roof from that same upstairs window where I’d seen the bird, but from street level it just looked like a mountain of snow. Winter break for college ended a couple of days later, sending me back down south, and I’ve always wondered what happened to the car. Did they bother to dig it out or just let the snow melt around it?

I moved to Mississippi a couple of years later, but couldn’t escape winter’s wrath.

There was the 1998 Christmas ice storm, when the sound of trees snapping in the distance sounded like rifle shots and frequent power outages were maddening. Besides losing the heater, do you have any idea how annoying it is to reset all the clocks in the house 10 times in one day?

I covered the Mississippi State-Texas A&M “Snow Bowl” in Shreveport on New Year’s Eve in 2000 — and drove back to Vicksburg the same night.

The trip that took 2 ½ hours before the snow arrived took eight across 200 miles of unplowed, unsalted Interstate 20. After driving all that way at a steady 15 mph clip, I let out a celebratory whoop when I finally got home.

During one snowstorm last year, I ran barefoot in the yard just to see what it would feel like. It was not the smartest thing I’ve ever done.

And then there was the August ice storm. A then-girlfriend decided she didn’t like me any more, on the day we were scheduled to take a two-day car trip to a family wedding. It was 90 degrees outside, but so icy in that car that you could’ve hung meat.

Seeing Facebook pictures and videos of people playing outside during their “ice days” this week brought a lot of memories rushing back and a smile to my face. Making the most of a bad situation and feeling the unbridled joy of conquering the elements is almost enough to make winter tolerable.

Almost.

I’ll still take my roaring fireplace and hot cup of coffee, thank you very much.

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Ernest Bowker is a sports writer. He can be reached at 601-619-7120, or by email at ernest.bowker@vicksburgpost.com