Cold weather. Maybe snow. Will the schools be closed? Milk and bread. Alabama football. These have been the talk of the area for the past week.

While I am eagerly awaiting the outcome of the National Championship game, I can’t help but think of the cold and snow.

I was born in Birmingham, but grew up in Bay Minette, about 45 minutes from the beach and never far from places where people gathered to have fun near the water.

When I ask people from down there “What’s been going on down there?” the answer is almost always the same for 10 months out of the year. “The heat.”

I don’t deal with cold that well. Though after living in north Alabama for the past decade, I don’t complain as much as I used to when it gets near freezing.

I learned to walk on icy stairs climbing the campus of the University of North Alabama my freshman year of college. One weekend it snowed and stuck. Those of us from the coast didn’t know what to make of seeing a winter wonderland. We got used to it by the second or third day, though.

Where I come from, people start putting on their winter coats when it gets to be 60 degrees. No joke. I have cousins who light their fireplace at that temperature.

But with cold weather comes the possibility of snow and the inevitability of ice. I remember the blizzard of 1993. While most of you were snowed in without power up here, we got a light dusting on the Gulf Coast.

We might as well have been in Siberia as far as me and my friends were concerned.

I wore shorts, sneakers and a coat while we played around in the snow the morning after it fell in my hometown. The snow was long gone by lunchtime.

It was probably 55 by noon. Most people with fireplaces had them going strong.

Several kids I knew had ventured out on four-wheelers in the wee hours of the morning after the overnight snow fell to drag makeshift sleds on long ropes behind their ATVs in the fields around my home town.

While jumping a dirt pile that day, one kid’s ATV flipped and he died. It put the day’s fun in perspective when we all heard the news that night.

It has snowed twice since my five-year-old son has been old enough to enjoy a day of snowballs and making snowmen. If it snows this week, I’m sure we’ll head out to pelt each other with snow bombs like we did last winter.

No matter how old I get, it remains fun to play in the snow for a bit. Until it starts to melt and things get dirtier than a New York sidewalk after a winter thaw.

Inevitably, there will be kids out on ATVs having fun if Old Man Winter puts a dusting on St. Clair County. Just remember to tell them to keep the throttle down.