Tag: spring

Talking about the weather

There is something fundamental to humanity that we notice and talk about the weather. Even though we are climate-controlled dwellers of enclosed homes, we will turn on our televisions to discover whether the 25 feet between our car and our place of work will be a sunny or damp sojourn. We never tire of talking about the weather: praising, blaming, complaining.

This week, however, the weather has made a real impact on my life, and more so on the lives of my friends. This weekend, it rained. It was epic. There were the standard jokes about ark-building (which actually DO get old, thanks). Still the deluge continued. By the time it was all over, we’d had more than 10 inches of rain. (Thank HEAVENS it didn’t come down as snow!) On Monday, as it was supposed to stop raining and wasn’t, I got a call from a friend. The water was coming up through the floorboards. Did I have any advice? Of course my advice was to get out and come to my home. Thus it was that three people and four cats joined us for two days. I’d love to say there’s a happy ending, but in truth they’re still displaced. All of their furniture is ruined, many of their belongings are, and they aren’t likely to be back in their own home until next month sometime.

Then, on Tuesday, the weather has been trying to win us back by being the most lovely, clement, soft, gentle, comfortable version of itself you can imagine. The last three nights the boys have come home by way of the park, where they have run and laughed and slid down slides and climbed and NOT WORN THEIR JACKETS because it was so warm. The extra light has been a halo of joy in my evenings.

Sunlight on a slide
Sunlight on a slide

On our walk home, I’ve watched with great interest the progress of the bulbs. By the bank, where there’s obviously a heat leak, the tulips and daffodils are likely only a week away. There’s a bank of snowdrops on a south-facing lawn. In my own front garden, the irises are out and lovely (I do not remember planting them, I confess!). The crocuses are significantly behind them. The daffodils are about 2 inches high. The hyacinth will bloom this weekend. I suspect the 70 degree weather on Saturday will also bring forth the first of the forsythia, which would be unlovely at any other time but in the newest days of Spring is a shocking delight of sunlight in flower form. I may find an excuse to travel along a local road, once on my commute, which I know is early to the forsythia party.

If past experience holds true, I will likely get very optimistic and convinced that really! This is Spring! I will go and buy some bedding plants. Then we will get 2 feet of snow.

This has never stopped me. In my defense, it also has never stopped Lowe’s from enabling my optimistic bedding-plant behavior.

I love this time of year. It is so miraculous. Through the winter I have looked at pictures of my sons, nearly naked in a lake, and wondered what sort of abusive mother I was to permit them to do that. Weren’t they cold? Imagination and memory fail to stretch to a time of warmth, or even heat — of overhead fans whirring and windows wide. We have stopped believing it is possible by the time spring comes. And yet, here it comes. Full of delights and remorse for the way we have been treated through the cold winter. And we fall in love all over again.

Thane loves the sandbox
Thane loves the sandbox

What a wondrous time is spring

I have spent the better part of 12 years being confused about Spring. I think there must be one year in your childhood — I’d have to pick the year I was 9 if I had to guess — where you solidify your view about how certain aspects of the world ARE.

Sweet and sour anything is yucky. I like hiking. Spring starts in March.

Some of these ideas are more easily modified than others. I have yet to get over the “Spring Starts in March” issue.

In Washington State, it does. The crocuses are probably starting out, even in my mountain home. The days are getting lighter. The last snow has probably fallen for the year. By the end of the month, there will be daffodils and you will be able to smell things outside again (for good or for ill). But I live in New England. Not even Southern New England. No. Middle New England.

It was 12 degrees when I woke up this morning. There is a foot of fresh snow on the ground, and more in the forecast. It is, by no means, the beginning of spring. By the end of the month, there will be 6 inches of dirty snow left on the ground and we will have at least one surprise snow storm in front of us. Possibly in June.

But somehow I can never quash that inner child who believes Spring is coming. My husband laughs at me because I always pointed out the red buds at the tips of the trees as a sign of the imminence of Spring. I had lived here maybe 8 years before I figured out that the red buds appear at the END of FALL. But still. I can’t help myself.

My youngest, my baby, has never in his entire life known a warm, welcoming world. His toes are rare and unusual visitors to his curious hands. It snowed the night he was born – an unseemly early snow in the Berkshires I barely processed in my post-partum fog.

But.

There are tiny little daffodil spikes under the snow, in front of our basement window fan (where it is much warmer). I saw the beginnings of snowdrops during a recent melt. I showed my son.

I heard birds singing this morning.

The days are longer.

And look! There are totally red buds on the tips of those trees!