It doesn’t do much good to complain about the weather because Mother Nature ignores my texts and emails.

Thanks to climate change or something else (choose your own reality), the 10-day outlook calls for warm, cold, sun, clouds, calm, gales, drought and floods, followed by blizzards, thunderstorms, landslides, bomb cyclones and a 40% chance of apocalypse.

Or we might be in for a pleasant stretch.

Winter through New Year’s was a sodden mess, with little to recommend it. I don’t mind the lack of minus 20-degree nights all that much, but I know they come with a good, old-fashioned winter. The other day, someone posted a meme on Facebook of kids climbing a frozen mountain pass to catch a school bus as snarling wolves and bears tried to seize their lunchboxes and/or kill them.

I tell the entitled young people of today (What? Heated seats? We had to light small warming fires in our old Ford) that the winters of my childhood were exactly like that.

Even though I grew up in Rhode Island, where winter was sort of meh, there were stretches in January and February with glorious 20-inch snowfalls. They supplied an arsenal for snowball fights and other tomfoolery that briefly made life a winter carnival.

I don’t recall having very good outdoor gear, so we paid a price. My cheeks and exposed skin turned red as tomatoes, the cold made my skin sting and my nose ran like an icicle drip.

But it was worth it when you roared down a snowy hill on your Flexible Flyer with its dubious steering, barely missing friends, strangers and trees in a mad dash toward a frozen pond with sketchy thin ice. We tempted fate, and it worked out, mostly.

Weather is a hot topic. The Nightly News on NBC leads with it many evenings. I suspect they repeat videos of smashed mobile homes in Alabama, canoes on city streets in New Jersey, overturned tractor-trailers in New York State, bedraggled people stranded at airports. And finally, the piece de resistance: a foot of snow in New Hampshire and Vermont!

We are all under siege.

Wait a minute, I say, we can handle 12 inches of snow, as long as we don’t get 6 inches of rain afterward. This winter, it can go either way.

Weather is also a big deal on Channel 5 out of Burlington/Plattsburgh, which we watch even though I complain about its coverage almost nightly. I have been following NBC since Huntley and Brinkley, so it’s awfully late to change that dial. (And I don’t want to get up if I’ve buried the remote again.)

On Channel 5, the young-ish chief meteorologist, Tyler, is the star of the show. The station makes more fuss over him and his forecasts than any of the newspeople. They seem to think he’s a prophet or a savant. Maybe so, but forecasting is a tricky business.

They have a weather team and a weather van, but when storms approach cub reporters still stand forlornly along quiet roads in hopes that a snowplow will happen by. “Flurries have already started and there’s a lot more where that came from,” says a “live” junior broadcaster, shivering.

Even though I don’t play in winter as I once did, I still welcome a conventional one. My snow fun involves shoveling, snowblowing, slipping on sidewalks and driving with white knuckles. I like to see the kids and skiers happy, not schussing through disappointment. And consider the pleasure of a wintry day when a storm has stripped away all options. There is nothing to do but sit inside and wait, watch the snow fall and warm by a fire. They are among the best days of all.

We live in New England, not spa land, and we are not meant to be pampered day and night. It is a challenge to deal with the cold, and I am not exaggerating when I say it gives me a sense of purpose.

I have flannel, down and hoodies at the ready. I can dress in layers with the best of them. This is not San Diego! Are we not men and women who endure?

So give us serious winter, not namby-pamby stuff. Trees will fall, and we will cut them up and heat our homes. Flights will be canceled, and we will book new ones. Plows will leave snow piles in front of driveways, and we will demolish them. When snow falls hard, we will make cheery snowmen with carrot noses.

As legendary weather optimist Little Orphan Annie sang, “The sun will come out tomorrow.” That may be true, but she didn’t mention the squalls at 11.

Dan Mackie lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at dan.mackie@yahoo.com.