Usually I don’t much care for February. The clouds are the color of a cement driveway and the wind hums an endless dirge of doom and gloom. It seems like spring will never arrive.

But this year, I’m looking through my office skylight at a bright blue sky and budding trees. Daffodils are exploding through the damp earth in my front garden. Just last week, a fly zoomed through my living room, no doubt invited in by the wide open door leading onto the terrace.

This fly has gotten me pretty ruffled. It’s spring, and it isn’t supposed to be. We haven’t had a decent frost all winter long. I never thought I’d miss scraping ice from my windshield, sliding down a slick slope in a pair of inappropriate shoes, or risking life and limb to drive through one of those white-out snowstorms that makes me feel like I’ve been trapped in a cotton ball—but when I look at nature’s desperate confusion I find myself longing for the February I once knew and hated. Come back! Give me days that are too cold and too gray. Give me bad moods and kids with runny noses and damp boots by the front door. Give me what I know, not some global warming-inspired premature spring that’s a quick fix for the winter blues, and the foreshadowing of a future without seasons.

My ten-year-old daughter cried last week because she’s afraid she’ll never see snow again. There was a picture of a ski camp in the newspaper a few days ago, featuring a dozen kids trying to make the best out of a basketball court-sized patch of artificial snow. This is in the mountains. In Germany.

I know that snow has slammed parts of the USA in recent weeks, and maybe that will still happen here. If it does I promise I won’t complain. But I worry. I worry that any frost at this point will kill all the buds and flowers. In their annual struggle to embrace spring, to leave the cold behind, to be touched by the sun—the plants and trees mark the changing seasons for us with color and determination, making us forget, deny even, that winter serves a very real purpose. I worry that we’ll look back on this year as the beginning of an end that we could have prevented, that my children will reminisce about snow the way we talk about dial phones and vinyl records. I worry that we’ll look back on this as the year of the fly in February.

The birds sing, light cascades through the fragile pattern of my lace curtains, I think about having coffee on the balcony—something I would enjoy in April or May. But it’s too much, too soon.

Robin Goldsby is the author of Piano Girl: A Memoir