Noticed in my yard
It’s no secret that the 2022-23 winter has been mostly the Winter That Wasn’t in southern New England. We’ve had scant little snow, and just one cold snap that froze and burst our pipes.
The rest of the time, it’s been a sea of brown — brown trees, brown ground, brown mood.
I realized yesterday that I’ve spent these months in a state of mildly anxious anticipation as I waited for a toad-strangling storm where everything shuts down but my power stays on and I’m inside a human-sized snow globe watching it all pile up as I pull out another tray of cookies that make the house smell wonderful. I love such schedule disruptions, the realization that you can’t make that meeting/class/obligation, the email flurries that say sorry, can’t do it, and then we all setting back into our chairs in front of the fire.
Yes, I do think about people who have to be out in storms (I am married to someone who spent a career doing that), and I hope for them that their shift ends and they, too, can settle back in front of the fire. I’m not an animal.
But schedules continued unabated. We enjoyed no interruptions, and winters in New England are supposed to be about interruptions. Weather events are meant to make us stop and wait, but our only snowfall of significance was 5 inches and it came so late in the season it got a big yawn all around. Yes, some schools closed but most of us got out in it and carried on. (The general pattern up here is no matter how tiny the first snow, everything shuts down because we all forgot how to drive on snow over the summer/fall. And then by now, mid-March, it takes a nor’easter to keep us indoors.)
We skipped all the way to our nonchalant “yeah, whatevs,” and that makes me sad.
But then I’m rushing to my car yesterday morning and I look over and spy this screaming piece of purple against the brown. We could still get snow. We could get a ton of it. But this little iris, at least, understands the protocol. So happy almost-spring.
Margaret Renkle wrote a piece about the non-winter in the NYTs. She lives further south somewhere, and is unsettled by it there as we are here. I have been struggling with local television anchors sounding chirpy about record warmth and lack of snow. I want them to sound alarms and make at least as big a deal about the long term consequences of climate change as they do about five inches of snow in March. My anxiety about the climate runs deep and steady. And then a tiny, purple iris blooms in Susan's yard and it makes me catch my breath and whisper a "thank you" that I get to see another spring.
Spring….flowers bloom, animals and birds begin mating, meanwhile humans continue with their scorched Earth ways - war, environmental neglect, etc……😢