I have acquired a piece of waterfront property without spending a dollar or signing a single form written in a style of English I cannot decipher.

I will not, however, be investing my savings in a yacht.

Or any vessel.

The lake, which I can see from any window on the north side of my house, is temporary.

Nor, legally speaking, does it belong to me.

This ephemeral impoundment appeared one day in the vacant lot just to the north. I don’t own that parcel.

The lake is just one of the tangible signs that this winter has strayed far from its typical script.

No season is normal, of course, by the strictest definition.

Climate, which aggregates weather conditions over years and decades, levels out the extremes, softens into averages the arctic outbreak and the heat wave.

Even looking at shorter durations, the chances that any season, or month, will equal the average are vanishingly small.

But occasionally the gap between average — what we tend to call “normal” although the two words are hardly synonyms — is quite a lot wider than typical.

So it is with the current winter.

This December was the warmest on record at the Baker City Airport, where data dates to 1943.

Both the daily average temperature and the average temperature (which also includes all the daily lows) set records.

The average temperature was 35 degrees, or eight degrees above average.

The average high was 43.5 degrees, almost eight degrees warmer than average.

December was also more damp than usual, with 1.23 inches of rain and melted snow. The average is 0.91.

November was soggier than usual, too, and January surpassed its 31-day average in just the first five days.

This combination — weather both warmer and wetter than usual — explains my neighborhood lake.

I suspect no small number of people hereabouts appreciate this trend.

(If not, perhaps, the occasional new water feature. Especially if it’s in their basement.)

Baker City has largely been spared the snow berms and slippery streets and frigid mornings, when unprotected nostrils clench in a particular way, that usually characterize the season.

Yet unlike last winter, which was similarly deficient in polar conditions, this winter has diminished, rather than heightened, concerns about a 2025 drought.

The storms that drenched Baker City have for the most part dropped snow at elevations above 4,000 feet.

Quite a lot of snow.

The mountain snowpack, the region’s biggest and most vital reservoir, is brimming. The Panhandle Snowmobile Club of Halfway reported recently that its snow pole near Fish Lake, in the Wallowa Mountains, was buried to a depth of 11 feet.

I’m ambivalent about the balmy beginning to winter.

I have no great love for the snow shovel.

(My shoulders have a special antipathy for the implement.)

I do not enjoy approaching every ice-encrusted intersection with trepidation as my tires slide to a stop.

But I also abhor mud.

That cloying gunk tends to be mainly an affliction of spring around here. For a few weeks after the frost goes out of the ground, any surface that’s not paved or covered with grass is apt to have the consistency of oatmeal left out on the kitchen counter overnight.

But so far the frost hasn’t even gotten into the ground.

I was in my yard recently, watching my grandsons, Brysen and Caden, running about, when I had a notion to see if tufts of lawn grass that infested a bed of phlox would give way with a gentle tug.

The roots yielded even easier than I expected, so much had the rain softened the soil.

But when I plunged my fingers down to the second knuckle there was none of the ice I anticipated.

The chance to do some gardening within a week of the winter solstice, a period when I typically leave the landscaping to its own devices, was gratifying.

My afternoon walk, a few days later, was not.

Although my route varies, invariably I stroll through neighborhoods (including my own) that lack sidewalks or, in some cases, paving of any sort.

I have come to rely on winter to transform street shoulders, and gravel streets, into firm, albeit often icy, places to walk.

But the other day, as I started along a section of Auburn Avenue just west of the railroad tracks, I stepped onto a patch of dirt speckled with the remnants of the most recent desultory snowfall.

Instead of the unyielding, but relatively clean, surface I expected, my boot squelched into soft mud.

I nearly went down, a tumble that would have been messy, embarrassing and probably quite painful.

Although the air at that moment was balmy, more redolent of spring, I longed for the reliable frigidity of January.

When the temperature slinks down around zero or well below, as it does here almost every winter, there is a certain malevolence, a sense that such conditions are inimical to human survival.

But at least the terrible cold locks up the mud, a confinement as secure as Alcatraz.