Un-Wintery Winter

The end of January and beginning of February in Minnesota should be bone-chilling, with snow that comes up to my knees, and frosty window panes in the garage that sparkle in morning sun. I should be turtling into my warmest sweatshirt, mug of steaming hot coffee in my hands.

That is not the case. I’m drinking my coffee while looking at a snowless backyard through my living room window, cursing the squirrel who just dug up a scilla bulb for breakfast. The pachysandra is green instead of buried in a blanket of white. There are no little bunny tracks across the backyard, no deer tracks in fresh snow alongside the house.

While I’ve enjoyed the break from keeping our driveway snow-free, in my bones I know this is wrong. Such a warm winter, lacking in the snowpack that protects insects, small animals, and plants during their slumber season, makes me wonder what damage is being done. We’ve had exactly nine days of really cold weather – the rest have all had above-normal temperatures. It rained all day on Christmas, something unheard of here. The past week has been foggy, any traces of snow melting away. Last year, we had 90 inches of snow for the season, more than half of it on the ground by this time. This year, we’ve had 7.3 inches so far and we aren’t expecting any for the foreseeable future. What will spring look like this year? And how early will it arrive?

Even though there’s little of winter to escape, my partner Mick and I are Florida-bound this week. We’re going to visit my brother and sister-in-law at their place in Cape Coral, look at the sunset over the Gulf of Mexico, marvel at manatees, and just hang out. We’ll take sports sandals for walking on the beach, since there is much foot-slicing debris from the last hurricane washing up on the sand every day. Florida, too, is changing, with hurricanes more devastating than they’ve ever been. Mick and I want to see some of its natural beauty while it’s still there to be seen.

I’m determined to find some joy in this strange non-winter. The day I wrote this post, I gave myself a moment to look at the brilliant red sky at sunset. I watched a white squirrel scamper up the dark bark of our oak tree. My two-year-old granddaughter, Maeve, and I made snakes out of Play-Doh and gave them little hats. When Mick and I walked around the neighborhood with her, she ran between us until she tripped on her snow boots, heavy on her feet while walking on our snow-free street. She picked herself right up and ran again, a perfect demonstration of resilience.

It’s resilience that we all need as we navigate this changing world. It’s resilience that I hope the garden and the animals that depend on the absent snowpack have, that this too-warm winter won’t kill them all. It’s resilience that the people whose homes were destroyed in a Florida hurricane will need to create another home that shelters them. And I think finding moments of joy in these months that aren’t what we expected is the thing that makes our resilience bloom.

So I’m off in search of joy. I’ll let you know how it goes.

header image courtesy of Christophe Schindler from Pixabay.com