So it’s snowing for the first time this season. It’s only 3-4 inches maybe, but it’s definitely snow and exactly what our new friends here in New Hampshire warned us about — winter. “Coming from Atlanta you’re going to be in for a big, big surprise,” they have chortled for the last couple of months as fall burst into colors and then faded and disappeared. “Winter’s coming. You’ll see.”

We understand. They’ve been going through this stuff proudly for decades, disdaining those of us who lived our lives in the semi-tropical South, fretting about the occasional inch or two of snow that shut schools, crowded groceries and turned roads into vehicle-swallowing skids. We understand. But we are still surprised, as it turns out.

We were surprised last night just before the snow started when we visited our local grocery, having been out of town for a few days. We expected to encounter nervous crowds, shelves absent of bread and milk (the staples that vanished from Atlanta’s groceries at the first mention of snow) and barren battery displays. What we found instead was a grocery mostly empty of customers, shelves fully stocked, and enough A, AA and AAA batteries to power the New Hampshire grid for at least a week. What’s going on here anyway? We chatted with the manager, who was calmly discussing the coming week’s schedule with an employee. “”I’ll be here until midnight,” the employee said with a resigned smile. “Doesn’t matter whether it snows or not, I’ll still be here.”

We understand all this, I think. We are from the tropics, so to speak, but that’s part of the reason why we’re here now. Given a choice, we prefer snow and cold to heat and humidity. Is that so difficult to figure out? It doesn’t mean we’re any more crazy about three feet of snow than anybody else, but we also remember clearly what two weeks of 100-degree-plus weather feels like. Frankly, we like the cold better. And we are coming to like the attitude of just about everybody we run into, who take it granted that it will be cold and it will snow (if we’re all lucky — after all, a lot of the economy in New Hampshire and Vermont depends on snow) and we’ll all be just fine.

Yes, I know we haven’t met a blizzard and lost power for a week yet. But we have lost power when the temperature hit 100. We prefer the option of bringing in more of that cord of wood and firing up the wood stove. It feels awfully good — even when the electricity is working.