Tag Archives: Spring

Temperature

20 Thursday Feb 2020

Posted by in Autumn, Seasons, Spring, Temperature, Weather

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One of the things that has arguably been made too easy with the advent of cell phones in everyone’s pocket is checking the temperature. Given the strange seasons we have had in the past few years, I have developed the habit of checking my phone app first thing every morning, usually hoping for warm days. Usually, I find that the temperature is exactly what the same app said it would be when I checked it before going to bed last night.

There are several things we look toward as indicators of the seasons—increasing or decreasing sunlight; conditions like rain, snow, or ice; phenological occurrences such as plants greening, flowers blooming, animal activity; and of course, temperature. Of these, temperature affects us the most. Our lives in the modern world change very little in response to seasonal change. The modern food industry delivers strawberries to us in January and squash in April, so we can cook whatever we want in any season. Rain, snow, or ice all must be pretty severe to alter our daily activities. The few things we do reliably with the change of seasons are to change our costumes and turn on heat or cooling in our abodes–both responses to temperature.

It’s funny when we finally have the first moderately cool day after a long, searing summer, and you see women out in their sweaters and scarves, even though the afternoon temperature climbs to 80°. Just can’t wait to break out the warm woolies. It’s the same when the winter yields to a few warm days, and people throng the streets in shorts and T-shirts. You see kids the next day and the next walking to school in brief outfits, even though the temperature has returned to freezing. Our clothes are a statement, not just of fashion, but of our belief in what season it has become.

We have a conflicted relationship with the temperature. We obsess about what the temperature is: thus, the repeated checking of phone apps, and hanging onto every word from a local TV weather personality. Thirty-two degrees is a breaking point for us—is it above or below freezing? But really, anything from 33° to 40° does not feel that much different than 32°. Beer is considered nice and cold at 42°. We complain about the heat until it’s cold enough to complain about the cold. Almost everyone’s favorite season is either spring or autumn, the seasons with the most clement temperatures, and we long for their coming. And then we stay inside anyway.

When I was a boy our parents, and all the parents in our neighborhood, would sit outside on pleasant evenings, talking and watching us kids rollick through the block. Walking down most suburban streets on spring evenings these days is like visiting a ghost town. We’re not out in it, we’re inside: a new season of our show is starting, there’s a new special on Netflix. I recently read the observation from a British author that Americans are odd in that they will heat their homes in winter to temperatures they’d never tolerate in summer, and cool their homes in summer to temperatures they’d never tolerate in winter. I think he’s right—I have been in some icy living rooms in midsummer, and in homes that felt like proof boxes in winter. I just don’t know if Americans are unique in this; most people in the developed world have good heating and cooling systems. Are we alone in being so wasteful, so unaware?

If this is a problem, I’d say the solution is the same as I always prescribe: get out in it. Don’t even check the temperature, just throw wide the windows and see how it feels. Stick your head out the door. Plan different things according to the seasons. Cook different things in spring than you would in autumn. The temperature is an important measure of weather, but it’s also an artificial one. What one person thinks is too hot to be out gardening or picnicking may be your ideal afternoon. What one person thinks is a bitter cold day may feel to you like the best time for a brisk walk. We are not all the same, even if scientific measures like the Fahrenheit scale try to establish some uniformity.

You don’t have to play that game.

Spring Calling–Are You There?

07 Monday May 2018

Posted by in Cell phones, Seasons, Spring

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Spring has come at long last to the Great American Midwest. The days are beautiful, breezes sunny and mild. Birds sing from every tree, vying for coveted nesting places, chasing one another joyously through the air. Down in the area I call Cypress Hollow, where I turn around on my morning run to head back home, two ducks have paired up. I watch eagerly, hopefully, for the appearance of their ducklings. Nobody can talk about anything except the weather. Okay, this being St. Louis, the weather and baseball—but then the two are closely tied to one another.

Here’s a thing I want to talk about. I am a librarian. Librarians, traditionally, have had a conflicted relationship with cell phones. We oversee places that are much better when they are quiet. Yes, we have long despised the stereotype of the shushing librarian, but the fact is, if we do not shush noisy people, other people will usually approach the desk to demand why not. This goes doubly for people using cell phones in libraries. Everyone rude enough to use a cell phone in a library believes they are keeping their conversation quiet, but there is simply no such thing as a quiet cell phone conversation. They are all, always and forever, disruptive to the general ambience, especially in a public library reading room, where ambience is our most precious commodity.

All this is by way of saying that I dislike the whole cell phone culture. It was a long time before I was forced to get one. I use mine regularly now, but not so regularly that I am seen walking about on public streets with the thing stuck in my ear, or my eyes glued to the screen, watching god knows what. I once said, and still believe, that there is only the thinnest line separating people who walk around talking on cell phones all the time and people who walk around talking to themselves.

So on a beautiful spring morning, when I am walking into the grocery store for something, and I pass a teenaged boy staring at his phone as if the ultimate answer were displayed there, I have the urge to shake him and say, ‘Look up! Listen! The sky is blue, the birds are singing, daffodils and tulips are blooming all around you.’ I don’t like to be too judgmental, the lad is wearing the uniform that indicates he works at the store, and is probably on a break. Maybe this is the only time he has in his busy morning to see if he has any messages. But somehow I doubt it.

I am troubled by young people growing ever more tied to their tiny, demanding devices. There are studies coming out all the time indicating that cell phone culture is detrimental to health, to attention span, to ability to perform well in school, and on and on. I was talking last night to a man who teaches art classes at a community college: he tries to get students to stay off their phones during class, but finds that they don’t because they can’t! They are truly addicted. My problem is that young people spend too much time focused on their phones rather than the nature around them.

Of course one of my major gripes with modern society is that we don’t spend enough time outdoors, we don’t cherish nature, we don’t watch the seasons come and go. But I find the problem growing worse with young people. How are they going to worry about whether earth’s climate is changing, and seek solutions to the problem, if they don’t even know what the climate is like now? But the problem could be even more pressing.

My friend asked me this morning about the meaning of ‘spring fever.’ Is it something to do with allergies? No, I explained, it is an expression indicating a longing for love and romance brought about by the warmer weather. Like in the Elvis Presley song ‘Spring Fever,’ a terrible song from the crummy movie ‘Girl Happy,’ with the wonderful lyrics:

The blossoms on the trees

Look at the honeybees . . .

Get up, get up, love is everywhere.

Love in springtime has been a motif of human existence since before we were recognizably human. Courtship and mating find their primetime when the sun grows warm and the days grow longer. But what will happen when young people no longer notice this? Can the species endure? There is cause for hope: there are always hormones, the other great fuse of courtship, and I have not read any reports noting a decline in them.

Someone should create an app that tells cell phone users when it is the first day of each season, maybe plays an excerpt from Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ and provides a list of things that are traditionally done in that season. I’d download that, even I sometimes get so busy that I miss the first day of spring or summer. Of course, I’d have to ask a young person how to download an app . . .

Leaves

24 Tuesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Climate Change, Morning, Seasons, Spring

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Leaves. I am finally seeing leaves sprouting on trees everywhere when I run in the morning. Clusters of pale catkins on the tree out my window. Tiny spikes peeking out of the cypress branches. Trees in the distance seen as more green than gray, even in the dim light of a cloudy morning. Spring has had a tortured birth this year, Persephone held back by her tyrant lover, Demeter sorrowing in clouds and rain and weeks of chilly days.

But it’s all over now, I feel confident in saying. No, I don’t. Not confident at all, because this is the third or fourth time since early March that a few warm days strung together have played us for a fool, and I would be dismayed, but not at all shocked, to see frost on the windshields by the weekend. The past few years have been like this in the Great American Midwest. It is perhaps too facile to note that our climate is changing. Will we ever return to normal weather patterns, or is it too late? Maybe we just need to accustom ourselves to new realities. It would worry me, the dire warnings from the science community and the evidence of my own eyes—but thank goodness we have conservative politicians to tell us otherwise.

A few years ago, when I left the ranch, I began the process of getting used to new realities. No more stepping out the front door in the morning to an overwhelming chorus of bird song, to watching sunrises over the barn and fog rolling in over the west pasture, whole herds of deer grazing and dozens of turkeys dancing in the rain. I live in the city now, and watch for other signs of morning. Yes, I see the sunrise, and hear bird song—these things still happen, albeit in ways less immediate, less abundant. As I run in the early morning, the dusk to dawn streetlights click off in turn, starting from the east and moving west. Morning has come. Crossing the Watson Road bridge, a starling flits past me, singing on the wing, as happy as a starling anywhere. At Shop ‘n Save the Budweiser truck backs into the loading dock, beeping loudly, and the Tastykake truck pulls out, drivers who rose long before dawn to get the day’s commerce underway. Traffic picks up, and I negotiate with inattentive drivers at each crossing. They don’t intend to even pause at stop signs, why would they yield to me?

It has taken stores longer than usual to lay in their supplies of bedding plants, of mulch, gypsum, topsoil, and manure. The huge parking lot ‘gardening centers’ are just now opening. I have no gardening to do, only three small pots with herbs in my window, but I still get that springtime feel, things quickening, springing to life, when I see a family loading the SUV with bags of fertilizer and trays of little marigolds and begonias, cucumber and tomato seedlings.

And today, this week really, I am finally seeing leaves on trees. Someone said to me a few days ago that if she had to, she would trade all the flowers in the world for all the trees, and I’d have to agree. They are the lords of the spring, of the summer. Yes, it is still a cloudy week, with not much sunshine predicted for days. But it is hard to be gloomy when everywhere are signs of life.

A Chilly Walk

18 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by in Seasons, Spring, Winter

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I went out for a walk this morning and did not dress warmly enough. It was about 7:30 and the sun was in evidence in the east; it was big and golden but emitting minimal warmth, and I was more than halfway through my walk before I stopped feeling the chill. It is mid-March now and one expects warmer days. Spring begins next week—another time when we wish the calendar had some actual power. It is only a figurehead timekeeper, and the seasons wander promiscuously over its weeks and months, doing as they damn well please.
I will be happy to see the spring come. Though it was a mild and variable winter, producing almost no measurable snow, it has lingered well past its welcome—even for those few among us who do throw out a welcome mat for the coldest season. It occurs to me that in the past several months some of my posts here have been dour and depressing. This is likely due to the overall national mood as much as anything, as well as the tiresome round of changes in my personal life.
But I also see the good in winter. The Celts saw the coming winter not as a dark time, but as a time of building light—a distinction without a difference to some, but a very different emotional perspective. Winter is the time when we reflect, take stock, and find ourselves. If your spirit does not grow strong in winter, you’re going to have a hard time the rest of the year. As Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet’s Garden:

And what, I ask you, is winter save sleep big with the dreams of all the other seasons?

As spring comes on, and I begin to look outside, breathe deep, look for greening leaves and budding flowers, I realize that I have not wasted the winter. It has been a time of producing things, of moving projects forward. It may be only in spring that those projects meet the world, but they were accomplished when the windows were frosty and the nights were long. For instance, I wrote this song, which I think is very good.
I also finished a chapter of my book, once called The Varied God but now called The Measure of the Year. I have worked on it for so long, and I can now see my way to the end of the project. There are two chapters left to write, plus an epilogue, and significant parts of those sections are already researched and outlined, so they should fall into place pretty easily. I know, that’s the coming season talking, but I like it. I am a willing sucker for the siren song of spring.
It was a chilly morning for a walk. No bikers and no runners passed me, only a few huddled figures walking to their jobs at Shop ‘n Save and the Dollar Tree. Even as I write this I am looking out the window at a gray and gusty morning, with little climatic indication of the changes I am so anticipating. But a while ago I saw a flicker scuttling up the tree out my window, busily pecking away in search of bugs, and I knew that some signs of spring are irrepressible.
Spring is coming, and only waiting for you and me to join it.

 

St. Valentine’s Day

15 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by in Seasons, Spring, Valentine's Day

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St. Valentine’s Day, or the Feast Day of St. Valentine, is traditionally a spring celebration. According to folk wisdom, it is the day on which birds select their mates for the upcoming mating season, and it’s time for humans to pick mates as well. It rarely seems springlike on February 14th in North America, but these traditions were set in place in Western Europe, which is generally warmer than here, with climatic seasons that begin as much as a month earlier.

Many saints’ feast days are placed on days which were previously pagan celebrations. It made it easier to convince folks to accept the new order, besides the fact that there are so many saints from the old days. Not so many these days, because back then, when there was no news coverage and people were generally more superstitious, it was much easier to ‘prove’ miracles. There are two basic stories about martyred priests named Valentine, but most scholars agree that they are just differing accounts of the same personage, especially since elements of the stories—including the miraculous healing of a child—are similar.

I dislike Valentine’s Day. I am not a curmudgeon, nor am I often accused of lacking romance in my soul. Call it the old hippie in me, but I don’t respond well to a designated day for romance, especially when it’s so commercial. The same little bouquet of flowers that cost $6 a week ago is priced at $16.99 on the holiday. I have seen the price of a dozen roses quadruple in the week days leading up to Valentine’s Day. Going to dinner anywhere nice is a trial of waiting and fighting to get served. It’s also a day of deep depression for some people who feel the absence of significant others, with suicides spiking. One time someone left a note in the women’s bathroom of the library where I work, stating, ‘I will leave a bomb in the library on Valentine’s Day.’ We had the local police patrol us all day that day, and nothing really happened, but somehow I understand the sentiment.

It is springlike here this morning, the day after Valentine’s Day. Temperatures were in the 50s (F) when I got up to run, or actually to walk, with short bursts of running here and there. I am finally getting over a nearly month-long bout of influenza, and trying to get back to regular exercise. It was a quiet, windless morning, with the lingering scent of yesterday’s rain showers. Weather apps say it will rain more today, which would be welcome, but I find that weather predictions are increasingly inaccurate. Looking out the window is advised.

I am sitting here now in the still morning, with Ravel on the radio and the windows open. I want only to gather my true love unto me, go for a stroll in the park, and picnic in the grass. This afternoon’s temperatures are expected to climb into the 70s. But I have to leave for work soon, so there will be neither gathering, strolling, nor picnicking. I’d say it will all have to wait until Saturday, but I see that a drop in temperature is predicted by then, down to the 30s, with a good chance of snow. So much for the emergence of spring.

Most of our holidays are seasonal holidays imported from Europe, even the nominally religious ones, like Christmas in winter and Easter in spring. Valentine’s Day is a less successful import, because it too is meant to be a spring holiday, but occurs too early in North America. It may have some interesting precursors in European history, springtime, romance, all of that. Here in America, it’s just an over-hyped, overpriced day of artificial romance in the midst of the lingering winter. Many old European traditions made a successful crossing to North America. I think this is one that did not.

 

 

 

The Flattening, or Remoteness of the Seasons?

30 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by in Autumn, Climate Change, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Winter

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I have not written anything here in a while. There is a certain irony in the reason. I began writing this blog in support of my work on a book, which I call The Varied God, and which I have been working on for more years than I care to count. Over the past several years, there have been periods of time when I have written more blog posts than pages of the book. Writing a blog is more fun and more gratifying. I can count the number of people who read my posts, and carry on conversations with people who respond to them. That doesn’t happen with chapters of an unpublished book.

In the past few months I have been working on the book more, and it has been going well. I am working on Chapter 5, and since there are seven proposed chapters, that feels like real progress, especially since much of the research, and some of the actual writing for Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 is done.

Chapter 5 is about the influence of the seasons on art—music, painting, literature. There is a lot of it, because the four-season motif has been very popular for most of history. There are some outright masterpieces, like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons or Haydn’s Seasons oratorio, and some really schlocky pop stuff, like Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post illustrations.

A book I was reading about seasonal art used the phrase ‘flattening of the seasons,’ which I found interesting. It is the same phenomenon which I have observed but labeled the ‘remoteness of the seasons.’ What I mean, and what the other author meant, is that at one time most people lived an agrarian, largely rural existence. Their lives were necessarily ordered by the procession of the seasons. But as industrialization proceeded and more people migrated to cities and suburbs, we paid less attention to seasonal change. We didn’t have to. Throughout the 19th century, and even up until about the middle of the 20th century, we experienced a great nostalgia for nature and the seasons. Many people made careers of writing books, articles, even newspaper columns about the seasons—Edwin Way Teale, Hal Borland, Rachel Carson, Henry Beston, to name just a few.

But now, most people, and I fear it is predominantly younger people, don’t even have that nostalgia. The seasons are remote from their lives, so remote that they don’t even dress warmly in winter, they just dash from one heated indoor environment to the next. We eat pretty much the same foods all year, do the same things all year. That’s why I use the phrase ‘remoteness of the seasons,’ and while I don’t want to argue the appropriateness of the phrase ‘flattening of the seasons,’ I think it has come to mean something else.

Last week I put up a Christmas tree. It was very warm out, and did not feel ‘Christmas-y’ at all. Autumn was slow to come this year, the trees holding onto their leaves for so long. At the Botanical Garden the other day I noticed a ginkgo tree had dropped all its leaves, but they weren’t the usual golden brown. They were just a tired shade of green. Once the days got chilly enough to feel like autumn, we had another week of temperatures in the 70s. Many people have noted that we are losing our autumn and our spring. We just jump from winter to summer and back again. This is, I fear, an effect of the climate change that isn’t happening. This is, to me, what should be called the flattening of the seasons.

There need to be two terms with separate meanings. Remoteness of the seasons means the phenomenon of people experiencing the seasons less fully because modern amenities have made them irrelevant in day to day existence. Flattening of the seasons means the gradual loss of a full four-season climate règime.

Both scare me.

Spring and Influenza

16 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by in Hippocrates, Humors, Influenza, Seasons

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I have been sick for several days now. My doctor says it’s a flu. On Wednesday she prescribed some medications—mostly ameliorative—and said that if I was not feeling better by Monday I should call her again. I laughed inwardly at that. Of course I’ll be better by Monday! Now it’s Saturday, and I’m not sure. I missed most of the week of work, the most I’ve ever missed work in my whole life.

Outside today is beautiful. The sun shines, the birds sing, the leaves on trees shiver in a light breeze. It is so unfair, after waiting so long for spring, to feel this poorly when it arrives. I hear again and again that this flu is ‘going around.’ This is something people always say. I swear that I could tell someone I had broken out in green boils that explode at random, and they would say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s going around.’

I don’t think the CDC had very good luck with its flu vaccine this year. It’s always largely guesswork on their part exactly what flu virus they’ll be fighting. There are many flu viruses, and due to something in their mitochondria, which I can’t remember well enough to explain and I’m too groggy with fever right now to research, they are fast-mutating. So the doctors at the CDC make an educated guess, produce several million doses, and then, as often as not, a different virus hits the population.

The added problem this year has been this very late emergence of a new flu virus. The causes for that are probably complex, bringing many factors into play, and will probably never be fully understood. So we blame the weather. That’s right. This second emergence of influenza is due to the fact that the weather has been so wonky. Cold one day, hot the next, et cetera, et cetera. Ascribing illness to the weather is as old as the study of medicine itself.

Hippocrates is known in history as the father of medicine. He was unique in his time for trying to discern the causes of illness, removed from common myth-making. Your cancer was not a curse from Hera, your leprosy was not the wrath of Poseidon made manifest. But Hippocrates did not have the benefit of the scientific method to work with. His ‘science’ was mostly what they used to call inductive philosophy: look at the symptom and think about it and try to figure out what causes it. This was a huge step in the right direction, but his conclusions were often little better than the traditional explanations of illness.

Hippocrates believed there were four substances, or ‘humors’ in the body, which contributed to a person’s physical well-being: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. Imbalances in these humors, which were controlled by the seasons, led to illness and disease. Perhaps the idea of seasonal influence on health did not originate with Hippocrates. His contemporary, the somewhat older historian Herodotus, wrote of the Egyptians that they were the healthiest of people because they did not experience the seasonal influence. ‘For illnesses fall upon people when they experience changes of all kinds,’ he wrote in his Histories, ‘but especially changes of weather.’ The Christian scholar The Venerable Bede, writing over a thousand years later in The Reckoning of Time, still references these humors, calling man a microcosm, a small universe in himself and thus subject to seasonal variations in health.

And in case you think that we have lost this kind of fascination with the seasons as the cause of illness, let’s not forget there are still many people who believe that you can catch a cold by being cold. I mean, how many screwball comedies of the mid-twentieth century hung on the assumption that two people who get caught in the rain will be sneezing and coming down with colds in the next scene? (Oh dear, let’s get you out of those wet things!)

I guess when people are miserable it’s nice to be able to attach blame to something. Rather blame the weather than the co-worker who showed up to work with a cold and spread germs everywhere. Spring is supposed to be the season of blood, the humor which controls youth, vigor, and vitality. It’s not the season of phlegm, which is associated with common cold, allergy, and influenza. But when the seasons criss-cross, and you don’t know if it’s winter or spring, all the phlegmy humor gets mixed in with the bloody humor and watch out!

Brahms’ Fourth Symphony

09 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by in Classical Music, Seasons, Spring

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I have listened to classical music my whole life. Even in high school and college, when we were all listening to rock music, I also found time to play the occasional classical recording. I credit this taste to a few early teachers and also to my older brother, who likewise has long enjoyed classical music. I have a distinct memory of being at a party at his house when he was in college, and late in the evening a Led Zeppelin album coming off the turntable to be replaced by a recording of the William Tell Overture.

People will occasionally ask me for listening recommendations, often with the added clarification that they want to start learning about classical music. It’s a big order. How do you ‘start to learn?’ My first suggestion is usually not to recommend ten or twelve pieces people should be familiar with, because once you start down that road, where does it end? I always recommend that you become familiar with the various forms of classical music, and see which ones you prefer. Are you drawn to violin concertos? How about string quartets? Piano sonatas are often beautiful and restful, as are most sonatas. What about larger chamber pieces, like serenades for strings, or sextets or octets? Most composers who have written a lot of music have composed pieces in most, if not all of these forms. I think it is a more productive way to learn about music than to say, ‘Listen to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos or Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.’

But when I am recommending this course of action, the last form I suggest listening to is symphonies. I know this sounds strange. Symphonies are what comes to mind when anyone says classical music. Beethoven’s Fifth: dadadadaaaa . . . . But symphonies are long, complex, and often intimidating. As with any style of music you’re not familiar with, it all begins to run together in a kind of sonic sameness. Starting a person off on symphonies is like handing someone unfamiliar with great literature a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses, or Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Just too much there. And indeed, you can listen to classical music all day every day and never hear a symphony. Of course symphonies are wonderful. It’s just a matter of developing the taste, the understanding, the appreciation of them. And Americans are notoriously short of the kind of patience that requires.

My patience has been severely tried the past several weeks while waiting for spring. The weather has been variable and unpredictable, unseasonably warm then dangerously cold. And once things started to warm up we had many days back to back of rainfall. One day last week we set the record rainfall amount for that day. Gloomy days, I’ll say. But yesterday and today have begun to feel very much like spring has arrived. You can delay the blessed season, but you can’t stop it. While we may know this, we become impatient with waiting. This is why there are so many springtime rituals in human culture—one of which we’ll be celebrating next weekend, though that one has gotten somewhat unmoored from its roots.

Spring has arrived. Perhaps that’s why, as I sat down this morning to think about what I might write, I was happy when the announcer on the radio said the next piece would be Brahms’ Fourth Symphony in E minor. This is a large, grand classical-romantic symphony, full of joy and bombast and one exquisite Brahmsian theme after another, and I was calm and happy and ready to hear it all. Yay, spring!

And in case you think I am being facile in moving this little essay from a discussion of symphonies to the beginning of spring, get this: Today is the birthday of famed conductor Antal Dorati. It was him conducting the Brahms piece, and when it ended a few minutes ago, they started another piece conducted by Dorati: Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Can you say synchronicity?

Anticipation

02 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by in Climate Change, Running, Seasons, Spring

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Though I now live within the boundaries of a major city, I am fortunate in having a paved running path out in front of my apartment building. It is called the River des Peres Greenway, because for much of its length it hugs one of St. Louis’s well-known features. I am reluctant to say ‘geographical’ feature, or even ‘man-made’ feature, because it hovers somewhere in between. The River des Peres is not, contrary to reasonable expectation, a river. It is a drainage canal which human endeavor has enhanced with stone embankments and bridges across it, which in heavy rain handles most of the runoff for south St. Louis. ‘River des Peres,’ as someone once put it, is the fanciest name ever bestowed upon a sewer.

The Greenway is fairly new, and it gets plenty of bike traffic and many runners. I only cover a few miles of it and don’t really know how far it goes, but I am familiar with the plantings that civic planners incorporated into its design. There are long stretches of prairie style wildflower beds, which sprout black-eyed Susan and coneflower in summer. There are many kinds of trees, mostly too new to be impressive, but welcome just the same. At one end where I run (down by the Metrolink station) there are flowering crabapple trees, which are beautiful in spring. At the other end, where I turn around to head back home, there is a quiet (or nearly so) little hollow that is always wet, where ducks paddle and court, and where rows of cypresses are growing.

Cypresses, if you are unaware, are one of the few deciduous conifers. In summer they look mostly like pine trees, but they lose all their needles in winter and stand as bare as maple or oak trees. There was one lovely little cypress in the front yard at the ranch and I learned to look to it as an indicator of spring’s arrival—though it was a painful process. The tiny needles are not like leaves; they come slowly, and can be well developed before you notice they are there at all—especially if you’re running by. Then all of a sudden, boom!—there stands a lovely green cypress tree.

When I was in college I had a few different roommates, and one of them was a real trial. He spent most of his days drinking and ingesting any pharmaceutical or herbal products he could afford with his wages and tips from his job bussing tables. Though he had a renowned sense of humor and could be fun to spend time with, he also tended to exhibit unreasonable and sometimes offensive behavior. One day he was in an extended afternoon session with a few friends, and one guy said that he noticed that day that the grass had turned green. This was something he observed every year, he said, the day the grass was green and he knew spring had arrived. A nice observation, a reasonable person might think, but not my roommate. He jumped all over the guy. For one thing, the grass is always green—it’s grass! And for another, any getting greener as spring comes on is a gradual process; they don’t just make it green overnight! Seriously, this went on for a while, and developed into something of a tense debate, with the parties involved eventually retiring to separate rooms to cool off and talk trash about one another.

Of course my roommate was right, not that there was any reason to make a big deal of it. A reasonable person just appreciates a poetically expressed sentiment and leaves it at that. But yes, grass is always green, and it grows more lush and deeper green as spring grows warmer. Just like the cypress trees are gradually putting forth new needles until even a passing runner can see them and think spring has arrived.

I wonder if all people have certain things they look to in their anticipation of new seasons arriving. Anticipation or dread, perhaps, since we anticipate the blessings of our favorite times of year and dread the extremes of our least cherished seasons. Everyone talks about spring’s first crocus or daffodils, the brilliant and short-lived forsythia blooms or Bradford pear blossoms. Here in Missouri we love our flowering dogwood—our state tree. But there are subtler things, more personal clues, like my watch on the cypress needles, or my old friend’s green grass.

I wonder if any of these will still be relevant in another five years. Already the system is breaking down in our time of climate change. Robins seem to be here as early as January. Azaleas bloom in the first week of February and then get hit with a hard freeze. I told myself this morning that the next time I run out on the River des Peres Greenway, my row of cypress trees would appear lush and green. I hope I’m right, but I haven’t checked the forecast to see if another round of winter is expected in April.

Dancing Squirrels

25 Saturday Mar 2017

Posted by in Climate Change, Nature, Religion, Seasons, Spring, Winter

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Yesterday morning I was writing at my desk, but distracted by squirrels running through the trees outside while the Swan Lake Waltz played on the radio. It didn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see a subtle choreography in their scrambling up and down tree trunks, back and forth over outstretched limbs. They all looked fat and healthy, and I thought, Ah Spring! Here at last!

We have had two springs already this year, interspersed with two returns of winter. I have felt rather sad and uncertain about the future since last November, like we are living in the end times for our world: this strange weather does not bode well and feeds the uncertainty.

Human societies have always had tales of the end of the world, and they are so often climatic. There was the great flood of Sumerian literature, as told in Gilgamesh, which was copied and some interesting details added to become the great flood in the Hebrew Bible. Ragnarok–the twilight of the gods in Norse mythology–is preceded by fimbulwinter, an unrelenting three year winter. This all arises from an ancient sense that life on earth is uncertain and is destined to end. People who raised crops for a living came to depend on the cycle of the seasons, and if there was any tardiness or latency in the return of spring it caused anxiety of an existential nature. This anxiety was dealt with mostly by appeals to the god or gods who controlled the season.

Now we understand that the seasons are inevitable cycles of nature, but the thought that the world will end in climatic holocaust is embedded in many religions. The practitioners of those faiths, taken with their own florid scriptures, hold a calm acquiescence, perhaps even an eager anticipation of the end. Evangelical Christianity or some other form of very traditional faith goes hand-in-hand with the kind of conservative political leaning that denies climate change. I don’t know how much of that denial is, at root, a belief that any cataclysmic change to earth’s ecology is part of a long-ordained divine plan, but I do know that Americans decided last fall against a government that might address the impending threat to our planet.

Even though I anticipate the coming climatic holocaust with foreboding, I don’t really spend my days wallowing in dread about it. Not many people do, as far as I can tell. Kind of reminds me of the great book On the Beach, by Nevil Shute, which was made into a movie starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. It shows people in Australia, the last continent not affected by fallout from the recent nuclear war, going about their business as usual, rarely acknowledging their awareness that the end is coming soon. What else can you do? As the old saying goes, when you don’t know what to do, you do what you know.

And so I spend my time cooking, writing stories, writing new songs, doing the things I’ve always done. Public discourse continues to rant about tax cuts, health care, equal pay, and many other things that will simply not matter in another few years. I am aware that I started writing about the charming image of squirrels dancing in trees, and was quickly diverted to a diatribe on the end of the world.

What are you gonna do? I think it’s likely that the squirrels will survive the coming changes. I don’t think you or I will.