Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...
At last, we get some actual winter! It started lightly snowing yesterday, and continued over night, and has been adding a little more here and there today, with the result that, for the first time this winter, there is actual snow on the ground. As in, not just a light dusting here and there on rooftops and cars, but a nice little blanket of white over everything. It's about bloody time.
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with winter: I don't like the shorter days, the lack of light, or, especially, the unrelenting greyness of most city winters, but I really like snow. And the briskness and clarity of winter air. Subtract the snow, and give us the sort of freakishly mild winter we've been having up until now, and what you get is all the bad of winter without the good. Snow reflects light, so having a nice blanket of snow tends to mitigate the SAD-inducing effects of the shorter days to some extent, by making the most of the light we do get. Without that, it's nothing but depressing grey blahness.
Worse is the fact that the weather had been mild enough to completely confuse the plants and animals. We had one serious cold snap in the beginning of December that killed off most of the annual plants and put the perennials into dormancy, but since then it's mostly been very mild... enough so that the grass had mostly turned green again, as had some garden perennials, crocuses and daylilies were sending up shoots, and lilac bushes were budding. In January. And squirrels had lost the weight they put on to see them through the winter and were frisking around like it was spring already.
Now, I like spring, so seeing little green shoots coming up and life returning to the earth is normally a happy-making thing for me -- when it happens in the spring! Having it happen in the middle of winter is just wrong. The last few times I've taken Kiska on long daytime walks, it's been increasingly noticeable, and I've found it really unsettling -- seeing all the plants coming up and everything looking like spring while everything else in my body and mind is telling me it's winter creates a weird sort of mental and almost physical discord. I tend to really feel the pull of the seasons in an almost-physical way, and getting conflicting information about them from my senses feels disorienting and sometimes seems almost painful or nauseating.
So finally getting the winter we're supposed to be having feels like a huge release of tension, a restoration of the balance of the seasons, while at the same time there's an undercurrent of sadness because I know that all the plants that came up or returned to life prematurely are frozen now, and I don't know how well they'll recover from this, or whether they'll be able to come up again when spring comes for real. And if the unseasonably mild temperatures cause that much trouble just in urban gardens, I can only imagine what kind of hell they've been playing with farms and wild ecosystems.
Well, at least the good side of having things like that happen is that the few people who still question the reality of global warming (mostly apologists for polluting industries, these days) look dumber by the day.
That, and the fact that now that we're finally getting at least some kind of winter, I get to see Kiska prancing and capering in the snow like a crazed puppy. That's always fun.
I don't know how long the snow will last -- the way things have been, I expect not too long. But we'll see.
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with winter: I don't like the shorter days, the lack of light, or, especially, the unrelenting greyness of most city winters, but I really like snow. And the briskness and clarity of winter air. Subtract the snow, and give us the sort of freakishly mild winter we've been having up until now, and what you get is all the bad of winter without the good. Snow reflects light, so having a nice blanket of snow tends to mitigate the SAD-inducing effects of the shorter days to some extent, by making the most of the light we do get. Without that, it's nothing but depressing grey blahness.
Worse is the fact that the weather had been mild enough to completely confuse the plants and animals. We had one serious cold snap in the beginning of December that killed off most of the annual plants and put the perennials into dormancy, but since then it's mostly been very mild... enough so that the grass had mostly turned green again, as had some garden perennials, crocuses and daylilies were sending up shoots, and lilac bushes were budding. In January. And squirrels had lost the weight they put on to see them through the winter and were frisking around like it was spring already.
Now, I like spring, so seeing little green shoots coming up and life returning to the earth is normally a happy-making thing for me -- when it happens in the spring! Having it happen in the middle of winter is just wrong. The last few times I've taken Kiska on long daytime walks, it's been increasingly noticeable, and I've found it really unsettling -- seeing all the plants coming up and everything looking like spring while everything else in my body and mind is telling me it's winter creates a weird sort of mental and almost physical discord. I tend to really feel the pull of the seasons in an almost-physical way, and getting conflicting information about them from my senses feels disorienting and sometimes seems almost painful or nauseating.
So finally getting the winter we're supposed to be having feels like a huge release of tension, a restoration of the balance of the seasons, while at the same time there's an undercurrent of sadness because I know that all the plants that came up or returned to life prematurely are frozen now, and I don't know how well they'll recover from this, or whether they'll be able to come up again when spring comes for real. And if the unseasonably mild temperatures cause that much trouble just in urban gardens, I can only imagine what kind of hell they've been playing with farms and wild ecosystems.
Well, at least the good side of having things like that happen is that the few people who still question the reality of global warming (mostly apologists for polluting industries, these days) look dumber by the day.
That, and the fact that now that we're finally getting at least some kind of winter, I get to see Kiska prancing and capering in the snow like a crazed puppy. That's always fun.
I don't know how long the snow will last -- the way things have been, I expect not too long. But we'll see.