Each year as the days grow shorter in England, where I have now made my home, I cannot help but miss the winters of my childhood, appallingly more than a half a century ago, in upper Westchester New York.

Our home on a cul-de-sac at the top of a hill was surrounded by trees, which by early December were almost always laden with snow. The ponds and lakes would begin to freeze over and the woods around us became studies in hard black and soft white, making them wonderfully mysterious...