Equinoxes and solstices are geometrical phenomena. They mark the passage of time in ways that are easy to understand and more or less universal. I understand people’s desire to watch for them, to mark them out, and to even reclaim them as somehow more primordial than other kinds of temporal passage points.
But changing seasons involve much more of a multi-layered confluence and conflagration of elements. And they are specific. This place has its seasons. They vary in their timings and specificities, and their variations provide for talking points because of the background of consistency those variations revolve around. When the consistency reasserts itself, we are satisfied.
Warmer days bring out the life that’s been hiding, all the more during a pandemic. The last few days here in northwest Vermont have seen high 60s and low 70s (20+ Celsius temps), which for March is not unheard of, but is still unusual. (Yesterday’s 70 was just three degrees shy of the 1938 record.) Most restaurants remain either closed or curbside only, and most bars closed, so the one place near the lake with outdoor seating has been packed, with reservations filled a few days ahead.
It’s when the variations—the delayed winters and early springs, the back and forth throttle of Arctic air masses and sudden winter thaws—become the norm that we start to worry. Worry and enjoy, enjoy and worry. Worry becomes the background, the consistency around which our enjoyments assert themselves.
With Bill McKibben’s “nature” having “ended” and Earth become “Eaarth,” perhaps it’s the foundation of regularity and reliability that has been thrown off, like a planet whose axis has tilted perceptibly, but not enough to keep us from hoping.
Low-level climate anxiety has become the norm, the new foundation, against which both the reoccurring joys and the high-level fevers (pandemics, hurricanes, droughts, and mass shootings) revolve like a dance of unreliable partners, feuding parents who still manage to join in the rhythms of the music provided by the thrumming orchestra of uncertain musicians, the earthbound orchestra in whatever bioregional union local it manages to gather in.
Spring doesn’t normally come here until weeks after its official, geometrical beginning. But its signs are creeping in around the edges.
