A couple of winters ago, I was cautiously driving home from a hard day of spelling and punctuation as a powerful wind whipped snow across the icy roads. I finally made it to the gravel and eased to within a few hundred feet of my driveway, mere seconds away from a warm supper.

Then came a whiteout. I kept easing forward, certain that I was going as straight as a freight train. But the ditch must have been full of magnets, because that’s where I ended up.

I walked the rest of the way, feeling like a letter carrier in Siberia, and then my son and I went out in the raging storm on a tractor with no lights – we really should get those fixed sometime – and towed the pickup out before the drifts could claim it.

We got back to the house, warmed up for a minute, and Travis said, “That’s the kind of thing that seems like fun when it’s over.”

Exactly. And that’s the trouble with the kind of winter we’ve been having in 2006. It’s just not going to be very memorable. Not enough suffering. A little light on the misery.

It’s snowing as we go to press, so who knows, maybe we’re in for some excitement. But these past few weeks of brown lawns and mild temperatures have been duller than watching paint dry; it’s been more like watching a low-budget documentary about watching paint dry.

Every Iowan has fond childhood memories of winter, although I suspect they’re not 100 percent accurate. Five or six good hours of sledding – or “sliding” as we called it – can morph over the years into the belief that you were out there every winter day for years on end. One time you dug two feet into a pile of snow, and now you’re describing it to your kids as a vast palace where you practically lived one January.

In reality, you probably spent most of your time watching Warner Bros. cartoons. But at least you have some nostalgia to cling to.

Once you’re an adult, of course, the game changes. “Fond” might not be the right adjective for the new winter memories you acquire, but at least you get something to brag about, some experiences you can point to as reasons for your amazingly well-developed character.

It’s also instructive to see how people change, chameleon-like, to match the cold, bitter surroundings. Not you, of course, but the losers around you.

Once, years ago, as a blizzard raged, the boss called to see what the weather was like out at my house. Pretty bad, I told him, while thinking: Wow, he’s concerned; he really does care about his minions! Well, he said, you’d better get started for work early. Nice guy, Harold.

Another time, when some friends and I enjoyed a Saturday morning by skating on Hickory Grove Lake, the ice shattered beneath me and I dropped into water that was just waiting for something to freeze onto. When I started my shift that afternoon on the copy desk, shards of ice falling from my extremities, I told my supervisor, “I almost died today.” “Oh yeah?” he said, and kept slamming Associated Press wire stories onto a big spike. He went on to become a priest.

One snowstorm was so bad, though, that the company generously offered to put us up at a downtown hotel when we got off work at about 2 a.m. As I checked out the next morning, there was one of my colleagues checking out – along with his wife. Apparently, he figured the drive in from Pleasant Hill wouldn’t be nearly as risky as the drive out, so he invited her to drop by for some hotel ambience. I got the feeling they had just created an excellent winter memory.