After just a few intermittent days of sun and warmth, we are back to unremitting gray, depressing darkened skies and snow – spring snow, that melts into muddy blackness in hours, before the next snow dump briefly hides the muck. Around my home that muck is worse than usual, much of it the blackened ashy residue of last spring’s wildfire that somehow clings far more readily and tenaciously than ordinary spring mud.
I find it a challenge not to become depressed as the exceptionally endless gray periods of this past winter have extended far longer than usual, through all of February and now much of March. One of the normal blessings of living in New Mexico is how much sun we receive. I remember only one other time in the past 50 plus years when, in my corner of the state at least, we had such week upon week of gray weather. One of those was the first summer I moved up here, near Mora, from my previous home just south of Santa Fe. I never needed my light summer clothing that year – it didn’t get either bright or warm enough to shed long-sleeved blouses. That was the summer of 1990. I questioned what I had done to myself by moving… thankful to realize by the end of that year that it had been an aberration, not repeated until this past autumn/winter/now spring when it has been gray for weeks on end.
I have a close friend who lives on the Oregon coast – and have teasingly accused her of sending her natural climate down here to torment me, while she responds that I’ve caused her to have to cope with too much hard-to-tolerate heat. The exchange of “normal”, apparently part of the shifts in pattern reflective of climate change, between here and there displeases us both.
I am mindful of the scientists warning that our concepts of normal must also change. Well aware that I should be grateful for the snow bringing much needed moisture to this still drought-stricken state, I ask for the virtually unobtainable – winter weeks of sunshowers, those ephemeral hours we sometimes enjoy in summer, when one can be sitting in sunshine and watch it rain hard just a quarter mile away. In past years something akin would occur from late February throughout March and sometimes into April – a heavy dump of snow over a 12 hour period followed by bright sunshine melting the piles, filling the creeks that run into the lake that supplies water to Las Vegas (the original one) NM. It is the unfamiliar gray day after gray day for a week or more at a time, all through this past winter and now into spring, that I find hard to endure.
It is probable that the gloomy weather contributed to my decision last week to get baby chicks. My flock of hens (and a few roosters) is sizable, their egg production more than I can readily dispose of since a few long-time customers have moved elsewhere. I do not need to enlarge, nor really to renew the egg factory. I just want something that, when I look at it, says “spring” and gives me reason to smile. See if you don’t agree.
1eclecticwriter 
The Cruelest Month
March 13, 2024March is the cruelest month. Despite years of knowing it is full of false promises of spring followed by bitter cold, often heavy wet dumps of snow, and chilling winds, I am unable to find balance as the temperatures swing from highs of mid sixties to lows in the teens and clouds chase away early morning sun even before I get out to feed the chickens. The persistently inconsistent weather has pushed the replacing of my septic system back and back and back again, as four consecutive days of dry weather are needed to do the work – and the delivery driver bringing the new tank has been unavailable twice, in the only weeks when those four days could be predicted. A lesson in patience that I don’t really need, after the past 9 months of being patient with an untimely contractor restoring my home from its damage in last May’s wildfire.
But maybe I should call May the cruelest month, as the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon fire catastrophe of 2022 that smoked but didn’t burn me, and the 2023 Las Tusas fire that destroyed chunks of my property and damaged the house both occurred in early May. This year’s May should not be a threat, as there is not enough vegetation left to feed another wildfire. Not that insurance companies recognize that it is quite safe to insure my neighborhood now… but that’s a topic for another day.
Maybe it’s November that is cruel, forcing us out of daylight saving time and back into darkness at the end of the workday, just when we most need a bit of extra daylight to shop in preparation for the winter holidays?
No, I’ll stay with March. The hope-followed-by-disillusion cycle occurs annually and repetitively throughout the month, aggravating my already unpredictable ability to function on any given day due to an autoimmune triggered depletion of energy.
Yes, I hear you. Appreciating the immediate present is a way to cope. Detach from planning, go with the flow, all those fine sounding suggestions that do sometimes help. They don’t produce a new homeowner’s insurance policy that depends on completed restoration of the property that depends on consistent enough weather to do the exterior finishing work.
April, please hurry up and get here! Thank you.
Tags:lessons, My Life, New Mexico spring, uncertainty, weather
Posted in environment, humor, Living and Learning, Social Commentary | Leave a Comment »