In our local mythology, winter is an annual trial, bleak and interminable, that we survive on delivered food and fervid dreams of day drinking in the sun. But what if it’s also just about the warmest you can be? I’m talking about that moment when you step into a Chicago bar from the cold. The windows are fogged over; you pause inside the door to stomp the slush from your boots before you look up and see your people waving you over and you feel so snug and suffused, for a moment, with a very particular sense of place, our place. We say we’re numb from the cold, but how come a friend’s company is so bracing just then, the music so rich, a beer so good? In the depths of our long winter, we pine for warmth. But we have it: It’s right beyond the tavern door.