Easter Sunday’s unambiguous spurt of spring — vigorous sunshine, 60 degrees, itsy Technicolor blossoms dimpling New York’s Central Park — now has the Monday doldrums. Snow — we got more snow. Some six inches. It’s April 2. What are we, Michigan, Montana, the Alps?
Spring seems uncertain if she wants to touch down and nestle in. She’s circling, weighing her options. She is fickle and flighty and flirty:
Here’s some sun and a teasing 50 degrees, cloudless and dry, she says. Now here’s a spritz of rain, 30 degrees, sky gun-metal-gray and cloud-clogged. And here, ha ha, are bluffs of sticky snow. Deal. I’ll be getting my nails done.
Winter’s a bitch. Spring may be bitchier, for now. The season’s schizophrenic whiplash hurtles like a clattering, climatic rollercoaster. And for many people, it’s no fun at all.
Climate change is irrefutably jumbling normal seasonal patterns. The erratic weather impacts swaths of natural phenomena, from plant blossoms arriving at the wrong time to dangerous tidal levels to the destruction of lucrative crops.
It is 35 degrees as I write this.
It will be 65 degrees, with rain, on Wednesday.
Amidst all this I’m supposed to be ruffled. I am not. I don’t like that the 70s and 80s are impending. I don’t like that it gets dark at 8 p.m., and soon 9 p.m. I embrace the 40s and 50s. I relish an early dusk. (At times in the Arctic Circle, they don’t see the sun for weeks. Glorious.)
Yesterday’s taste of true spring, the one we’ll soon be stuck with, was like a warning shot telling me I’m in for months of bright, hot discomfort. For everyone else it was a harbinger of heaven, petal-strewn paradise, a fantasia for flip-flops. They can have it. Or at least when spring decides to figure herself out, cut the confusion, and finally land.
GNASHING. 