By my teens it was already apparent that IL winters were becoming less snowy, but it was still a slushy+salty mess on the roads.

I still have contact with friends back home and the impression our convos leaves me with is that they're out riding mountain bikes in the winter months my childhood would have had me sledding in a snowsuit.

But maybe it's just irregular and there's lots of icy/slushy road days. I admit I don't pay attention to the weather forecasts back home, it's just passing conversations with old friends combined with what seemed like a trajectory towards increasingly mild winters before I left the state.