Quote of the Day (Margaret Renkl, on an ‘Exquisite Sort of March’)

“We don’t deserve a March like this. We have tortured the earth so thoroughly and for so long that we deserve only the hungry lions of March. We are having the exquisite sort of March anyway. I glory in every tiny, iridescent green bee waking to feed on the first vanishing bloodroot flower, the first ephemeral spring beauty, the first woodland violet and cutleaf toothwort. Soon there will be trilliums and trout lilies, too. Any day now, toadshade trilliums and trout lilies! If you tell me I don’t deserve this joy, you are telling me nothing I don’t already know. The world is on fire, and I’m the one who struck the first match. I did it, and you did it….

"I am in love with the mild light of springtime even so.”—Essayist Margaret Renkl, “Spring Brings Joy, Even in a World on Fire,” The New York Times, Mar. 10, 2022

I don’t know if Ms. Renkl gloried in March this year down where she lives in Tennessee the way she did back in 2022. At least in my neck of the woods here in the Northeast, it was more or less par for the course, seasonally: one week of pretty warm temperatures, but all in all, brisk and/or rainy, with no late snow.

I would be worried if up here we did experience anything like what Ms. Renkl had two years ago. From what I see of extreme summer heat, climate change is continuing. If plenty of those “tiny, iridescent green bees” in Tennessee start showing up here at this time of year, then global warming, I am certain, would not just be proceeding but galloping.