Nobody asked me if I wanted to change seasons

Antonio Vivaldi did a masterful job with his “Four Seasons,” but I would be perfectly happy with a smaller number.

If I had a vote in the matter, I’d vote to eliminate the season that’s coming up in about a month or so on the calendar — and usually faster than that on the thermometer.

I’ll admit, we’re into the time of year where I spend six months asking myself why I’m living in a northern clime. I’ve been asking that question for better than half a century and, to be honest, I still haven’t come up with a good answer.

All that’s left for me is to avidly pursue my favorite winter sport — hibernation. Unfortunately, I’m not able to do that 24/7, so I’m stuck venturing out into the cold and snow way more often than I’d like. And just once is way more often than I’d like.

Of course, to get to winter, we have to get through fall, which is an all right season I suppose — except for the fact that as we get farther and farther into fall, we get closer and closer to winter, so that’s at least one strike against autumn.

Autumn is also the time when all those pesky leaves fall off the trees and fill up the yard, not to mention the gutters.

There was a time when I found fallen leaves a lot of fun but, like a lot of other things, my perspective seems to have changed as I’ve gotten older.

They used to be great to play in when I was much younger. Growing up, we used to wait until there were enough to pile up several feet deep in front of the front porch.

My brothers, my sister and I would then go climb out the second floor window onto the porch roof and take turns jumping into the leaf pile.

Today, you’d probably be sanctioned by OSHA if your kids tried that, or at the very least you’d be accused of child neglect or abuse.

Somehow, though, all five of us survived those escapades. Some would chalk it up to sheer dumb luck — and they wouldn’t be far from the mark which, fortunately, none of us ever when we were jumping off the porch roof.

That was also a time when, after you tired of jumping into the pile of leaves, you could rake them out into the curb and burn them all up in a glorious bonfire without having the EPA — or Al Gore — cite you for polluting to the air and adding excessively to the carbon footprint.

Now all we can do with leaves is rake them out of the yard and to the curb for the city to vacuum up, which is what Terry spent most of a recent Sunday afternoon doing — with a little bit of help from me, after the football game was over.

They sat there for about a week-and-a-half before the city got back around to our neighborhood in their leaf-vacuuming rotation. That meant, on those nights when we had to park one of our vehicles on the street — because the driver of the other one would be the first one out in the morning and didn’t want to waste time moving them around — we had to park in the middle of a pile of leaves nearly up to the rear view mirrors.

One of those nights came right before the city came through with the leaf vacuum. They came through early enough that I still hadn’t left with the truck and now we’re driving around with one side of our blue pickup truck covered with shredded leaf debris. Apparently, that vacuum truck doesn’t get everything.

Too soon, we won’t be able to park either vehicle on the street — unless we want it plowed away with all the snow some night — which means that somebody (make that me) is going to have go out in the cold at night to move the car and the truck around if they’re not in the right order. That makes just one more reason for me to want to subtract one season from the year.

It used to be that we could occasionally escape these frozen climes and go visit my parents in South Carolina, but now that they’re gone that’s not an option.

My wife’s brother and sister-in-law do have a condo in Panama City Beach, Fla., and we escaped down there for a week last March, but that’s a long time to have to put up with cold and snow in order to get a little relief.

It would be a lot simpler, at least to me, to just do away with the period from November through March. I can tear those pages off my calendar, but unfortunately that doesn’t help.