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.

Photo of the Day: Just Too Soon for Spring

When I was a lad in the early Seventies, a popular margarine commercial’s tagline was, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!” And, indeed, the lady decided to have her revenge on us this year—first with a major tease, with a couple of days recently hovering around 70 degrees, and then the blizzard that hit the Northeast coast these past 24 hours. The storm occurred just a week before spring. Grrrr.

On Facebook, a number of New Yorkers seemed rather disappointed that, after all the hype, they got virtually nada in the Snow Department. But it was all a matter of where you were, and where Mother Nature deemed to vent her fury.

I took the picture you see here around 10:30 this morning. When I got back inside the house, the newscasters were saying that my town, Englewood, NJ, had 6.2 inches. It felt like more—and, in short order, there was more. Within half an hour of this picture being taken, you would never have known I had stepped out the door grimly, shovel in hand.

About 4 o’clock, I returned. As I dug in, I took a quick estimate. Well, it wasn’t any deeper than the morning. But, after a few minutes, it sure felt like it. In the several intervening hours, a layer of sleet had been added to the mixture, adding to the burden. As bad as I felt, I consoled myself with the thought that at least I wasn’t one of those people who had to drive today, with the roads being positively treacherous.

Early tonight, the meteorologist on my news station said Englewood had received a grand total of 10.5 inches. It felt worse—maybe 1.5 inches more—and, as I looked outside, it was worse. Again. Oh, they were just “flurries.” But for me and the various neighbors who’d spent so much time digging out, we didn’t want to see one single speck of the white stuff again—even if Mother Nature is peeved (about being fooled, about climate change—pick your poison).

Quote of the Day (Richard Wilbur, on a March Storm)

“Beech leaves which might have clung

Parching for six weeks more

Were stripped by last night's gale

Which made so black a roar.”— American poet Richard Wilbur (1921-), “March,” in The Four Seasons: Poems, edited by J.D. McClatchy (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets edition, 2008)

Quote of the Day (William Wordsworth, on March’s ‘Life in the Fountains’)

  “Like an army defeated
   The Snow hath retreated,
   And now doth fare ill
   On the top of the bare hill;
 The Plough-boy is whooping—anon—anon:
  There’s joy in the mountains;'
  There’s life in the fountains;
  Small clouds are sailing,
  Blue sky prevailing;
The rain is over and gone!”—William Wordsworth, “Written in March While Resting on the Bridge at the Foot of Brother’s Water” (1807), from The MajorWorks: Including the Prelude, edited by Stephen Gill (1984)

I took the photo accompanying this post this past weekend at the Tenafly NatureCenter, not far from where I live in Bergen County, N.J.