He comes running at me with open arms and I bend down for a nuzzle, for who would refuse a three-year-old’s embrace? But then I see he is puckering up and is aiming for the lips and I start to panic. This may not be the nicest response from a grandmother for I do love my grandchildren. I love them on the changing table. I love their stinky socks. I love their shoes full of sand they dump on the rug.

I love their messes, but I fear their juices. Especially this time of year when every grandparent knows that even the most adorable of creatures are made of mucous.

That got me to thinking that maybe we need to teach small children to air kiss, to go cheek to cheek, kiss-kiss, like the French and other Europeans, which might limit our exposure to germ central.

Problem is I never can remember if you’re supposed to start on the right or the left when doing the two-cheek peck.  My California friend Caitlin who runs an inn in the Dordogne part of France says she tends to aim left, but finds it often a random and individual decision. She opts to lean forward and tries to sense where the other is heading.   Following the other’s lead, like in ballroom dancing.

She said little French kids adapt the two- cheek kiss early, but she’s not sure if that has any impact on the French flu and cold season.

I grew up in a family which pretty much limited hugs and kisses to a few friends and relatives. But I’m a Californian where everyone is a liberal when it comes to hugging. Our grandkids are natural born huggers and kissers. They get together and trade slurpy kisses, piling on each other like puppies. In fact the 16-month-old kind of kisses like a dog, sticking out his tongue to lick a favorite face.

They are a delight but in winter I must think of them as Sneezy, Wheezy and Drippy.

I was encouraged to read lately that cold and flu experts say the nose is deadlier than the mouth in terms of germ passing. The quantity of virus on the lips and mouth is less than the nasal juices. That actually makes kisses safer than sneezes.

In this department there has been progress. Many adults grew up being told only to “cover your mouth” when hit by a sneeze or cough, which is fine but then you have to do clean-up on your hands.  Today’s kids are trained to go one better. They use their elbow to capture the spray. This is known as the Dracula sneeze, the sleeve sneeze and the elbow sneeze.

This avoids blasting everyone in close range and is hygienically superior to exploding into your hand.  Two of our three grandkids have mastered this, probably because their mother, an elementary school teacher, pretty much spends the cold season reminding all people, small and big, to go for the elbow.

The toddler grandkid is too young for that lesson and still delivers his ka-choos with abandon. But he has good role models and hopefully will soon be sneezing into his sleeve.  We grandparents are also trying to remember to use our elbows. And keeping our hands and mouths to ourselves. With all that, plus hand sanitizer and a flu shot we all may make it to spring and the kissing season.

Instead of our usual Winter Lite we are having record cold. A cold snap, they call it. Nothing as punishing as in other parts of the country. A Kansan might poo-poo how we fret over our lemon tree, wrapped up l­­­­ike a dowager on a cruise ship. A New Englander might not share my delight in how my neighbor’s frosted roof glimmers in the dawn.

I relish the cold. I’m glad that our winter has strongly declared itself this year. I like a two blanket night and the dog under the covers. A fast hike in the bright cold.  A hot tea afternoon with a good book.

We celebrated the winter solstice in December with candles and hot pepper soup, a toast to the shortest day of the year. After the solstice the daylight would grow but there would also be more winter. I reread Mary Oliver’s poem about winter coming.  ”So let us go on though the sun be swinging east and ponds be cold and black,” she wrote in “Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness.” To me, the message is that the earth and maybe humanity need the darkness in order to start again. “In order that it may resume,” she said.

In winter we warm our hands in each others coat pockets. We sit by the wood stove, which, in our case, is really a gas burner with faux red coals.  And huddle under my mother-in-law’s nubby apricot blanket, all wool, made in the USA. I call it “the Eloise,” as in “it’s freezing in here, where’s the Eloise?”

When a friend died his Native American soul-mate instructed those who had gathered at the hospital to go back to his home and build a small wood fire in the yard. It should keep burning for at least four days, and it would be the obligation, he said, not of the family, but of friends, to tend the fire. That fire has now been going for a week, there being no pummeling rain to douse it and enough friends with firewood to contribute. It stays lit from the last log at night to the first one in the morning.

Visitors toss weeds and herbs into the fire – sprigs of sage, rosemary and lavender that haven’t shriveled up in the overnight freezes. It’s a fine way to pay one’s respect and comfort each other. I think the idea is to encourage the spirit of the dead on its journey. This fire also lifts the spirits of the living.

People stand around the fire, warm their hands and swap stories about our cowboy-reporter-conservationist friend.

Winter gives us a close-up look at nature. The hydrangea bushes dropped all their leaves together in one night, like dancers fluffing their skirts. Every morning the dog and I pass the rose bush down the street, all twigs but for one tattered red bloom. The birds come close in winter if you wait quietly. I stand at my kitchen sink and nibble toast while they breakfast ’round the bird-feeder.

Our days will warm up, we count on that here. But there will be more winter, more birds and stories, and then like Mary Oliver promises, we will resume.

We went looking for aspens.  Fall color a la Colorado.  Leaves the color of butter and marigolds, as intense a yellow as Julianne Moore’s gown at the Emmy’s.

Leaves that flutter like butterfly wings, against a sudden morning chill. Leaves that twirl in the searing afternoon sun. Make you think about getting out the down jackets, making soup, gathering people home.  The spell of the western aspens take no back seat to those red leaves on the east coast.

We came up with a road trip from California to Colorado, to meet with friends who live in Kansas. It was a rare man-plan vacation, concocted by my husband and his motorcycle buddy who on a trip last fall had been so struck by the blazing Rockies that they decided we should rendezvous there this year.

We packed our pickup with New Yorkers and books, coffee makings, peanut butter and crackers, stuffed pillows into our tender lumbar regions, and got out of California and into Nevada and Utah and Colorado. Using real maps, the fold up paper kind you get from the AAA that let you follow how far you’ve gone and must still go.

As conflicted as this country is, as much as we yell at each other, we still come together in our mutual adoration and pride in the physical beauty of the place. Eventually you end up at a lone gas station eating ice cream bars and talking about the last amazing stretch of nowhere.  And nobody is really paying attention to the other’s  bumper sticker or gun rack because we’re all just really wanting to ogle the pretty leaves and some big piles of rocks. All looking for a view of America.

I’m kind of chicken when it comes to the desert.  It’s so exposed and raw. And it has snakes. A rest stop in the desert consists of two toilets and no trees. There’s no cell service, hardly any radio. The sign says, next services, 68 miles. You are on your own, bud.

But it’s an adventure. I put down my Alan Furst novel set in Paris and looked up at dark, cracked, ominous mountains that look like Afghanistan. I took control of the CD player,  popped out my husband’s endless and forever Goldberg variations in favor of an old Bob Seger CD and wailed, “We were young and strong and we were running against the wind.”

Then came the giant red rocks, the enormous spires you get in Utah, that look like a stone cityscape, a walled fortress or some government buildings in Moscow. You must stop and pay respect. You have to get out of your car and place your tiny little human self next to those ancient domes and canyons.

Then you get to sweep down into the dusty town of Green River and escape from the highway food and gas marts to a side street oasis called Desert Flavors, painted purple and serving true creamy gelato and coffee drinks.

Oh, yes, the promised aspens. The Rockies delivered their fall color. Spilling down mountain crevices, bunched beside rivers, dressing up the plainest Jane town, the aspens appeared in glimmering jeweled clusters. But we saw no big super shows. We were a bit late in the season explained Constance who runs a roadhouse in Twin Lakes, Colorado which provides claw-foot bath tubs and a front porch where you can hear night sounds from wild things in the mountains.

We met up with our friends in Salida, Colorado, an arty town with good chefs, youthful energy, a river walk and whimsically painted old houses. The trees were perfectly yellow. The weather was perfectly fall.  And the funny thing was, it was almost perfectly the same when we came home. Returning through Yosemite, we were greeted by our own, perhaps less famous, aspens and back to the golden fuzzy hills and russet vineyards of a California fall.