Remember a couple of weeks ago when I went off on some rosy screed about how spring was here and we could all thumb our noses at winter and say neener-neener?

Yeah, well it’s been freezing cold ever since, there’s been another blast of snow and I’ve done a complete worm turn on it. Winter is NEVER going to leave, I hate everything and we’re all going to die. Please make the appropriate changes in your diaries, calendars or wherever you keep notes on my columns. You DO keep notes, right? How else are you going to know what to buy me on major holidays?

So, I just got back from a quick vacation. Ogunquit, I think it was, or someplace equally difficult to pronounce. There was an ocean there and I’m pretty sure it was the Atlantic, which is the biggest ocean in Maine. The beach was equal parts sand and snow. I saw sea birds flying over the boarded-up restaurants, dreaming of summer like the rest of us. I went into a thousand souvenir shops. I didn’t get you anything.

This concludes my vacation report.

I bring it up only because I’m reminded of earlier vacations during which I was haunted by things going on back home. It was once a bona fide curse, you know. The police knew it, the bad guys knew it and every reporter at the paper knew it. Whenever I left town, bad things went down in the Twin Cities.

There was the time I headed for the hills of Vermont. I wasn’t even halfway there when I got word that two people had been murdered and buried in shallow graves.

There was the time I slipped away for Easter and three men gunned down a crack dealer in a downtown apartment.

There was the time I went to Prince Edward Island (which, weirdly, also has an Atlantic Ocean) and got word that a certain mayor had been arrested for drunken driving.

There was the time I went to Utah and a UFO landed in Kennedy Park.

Just kidding about that. I’ve never been to Utah. Nobody has.

I used to hit the road with great reluctance, always fretting about what action I would miss back on the crime beat. I’d call cop friends from airports. I’d climb trees or other tourists in order to get a Wi-Fi signal so I could scan the headlines from home. I’d suddenly freeze in my plaid shorts, Hawaiian shirt and black socks pulled all the way up to my knees.

“Somewhere in Androscoggin County,” I would say with psychic certainty, “somebody was just beaten to death with a snowshoe.”

It happened every time I went away and it ruined many a fine trip. In Las Vegas once, I walked away from a game of high stakes Parcheesi because I’d developed a strong hunch that bullets were flying in Lewiston. It happened in Boulder, Colo., in San Juan and in the deep desert of Phoenix, which is crawling with scorpions, so don’t go there.

Everywhere I went, the force of Lewiston crime news tugged at me like gravity. I would rise from our bungalow bed at 3 in the morning and stand by the door, suitcase in hand.

“I’ve got to go,” I’d tell the wife. “The crime beat needs me.”

Then I’d realize I was wearing only the black socks so I’d shut up and go back to bed.

The point here is that you must wear pants to travel in the middle of the night. The point is also that local crime doesn’t haunt me anymore when I’m on the road. I don’t know when it happened — it was probably around the time I visited Los Angeles for the first time, because when I’m in Los Angeles, I don’t care at all what’s going on in the rest of the world. More important, I don’t know why it happened.

As far as I can tell, the feeling (or lack of feeling) is akin to that sense parents get when they realize their kids don’t really need them anymore. It’s liberating, I suppose, but also kind of sad. A change-of-life kind of thing. A shifting of priorities.

When I go away, the crime beat is in capable hands. There’s Chris, my pardner on the crime beat. There’s the new guy, Doug Something, who took to the beat like a cat takes to the litter box. And there’s every other reporter on staff, who knows how to handle crime news even if they don’t particularly like it.

So be it. I can finally travel without guilt and tension. I can visit all those places I’ve wanted to see, like your time share in Miami or your camp on Moosehead Lake. Please leave the keys under the mat.

I am likewise free to visit the finest nude beaches the nation has to offer. I hung on to the black socks, you know. I’m gonna look spiffy.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. You can file your notes on this column under “Random,” and email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.

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