Reverend Lovejoy’s chilling words echoed in my mind this morning as I looked out the kitchen windows and realized that winter, despite all this tantalizing teasing about global warming, is upon us. Sure, most of the trees still have most of their leaves, and a lot of them are still sorta green. But my sickly ghetto trees, those that famously grow in Brooklyn, are bare. They were already half-dead, of course, as most of them are. But I swear they had leaves on Wednesday.

Last night, the goofy schmuck on TV for the 5 seconds it took me to press the DVR button says it might snow on Sunday.

So that’s it, I guess. Now it’s just an inexorable, depressing march toward the time when I will once again be spastically trying my best to shovel snow off the sidewalk like the Person of Tropics that I am. And the world dies for six months.

A friend sent me an apparently only-in-Miami article this morning with the subject “Miami as third world country!” Us South Floridians are not unused to having our country — er, I mean, region poked fun at by the rest of the US as a gaggle of kooky santería practitioners or a banana republic. But I’m taken aback: there aren’t other neighborhoods in the country where chickens roam as part of the landscape? Other cities don’t have a chicken catcher squad? Fine. But I know what a rooster sounds like, and I have heard them all over Bushwick. Add in the bodegas and the occasional person dressed completely in white, and subtract the snow — have I come full circle?