It’s time to call the authorities to file an MSR again, you know, a Missing Season Report?
Last week it was 52 degrees outside with clouds and rain.
This week it is 86 degrees in mostly brilliant sunshine.
If anyone sees spring could you tell it to phone home?
Thanks to the chilly chop of our Great Lake, we don’t have gradual thaws and slow melt-offs, we don’t have weeks of windbreakers and sweaters to separate parkas from tank tops.
We get The Switch.
It’s off one moment, on the next.
Our long dark winter night seems to always overstay its welcome into what in other places would be warmer transitional months.
But the heat builds, slowly and behind the scenes at first until, like boiling water, it froths and bubbles to the surface in a seeming instant.
What’s the result?
That would be the fifty-two degrees one day and the eighty-six degrees the next.
It’s a testament to the power of Nature that we have any flowers at all given that the tender shoots have to push through slushy ice each year.
Just how do the trees around here ever bear fruit given that most of them literally freeze their blooms off in April?
We should have time to adjust from snow blindness to sun screens.
Human beings need to adapt slowly from snow blowers to lawn mowers, from sleds to bikes, from wool socks to sandals.
Where’s the gentleness, people?
Where’s the transition?
Not us. Not this year.
Not any year.
All we get is The Switch.