Friday, March 16, 2007

Second-Guessing Spring

Listen to what we’re hearing out our morning windows lately: [bird sounds]. Is that Spring calling? After all the ominous global-warming news this winter, I find myself second-guessing the turning of the seasons.  Instead of my usual simple delight at the return of song birds and warmer weather, I have contracted some 21st century version of Seasonal Affective Disorder ... toss the diagnosis up in the air and you get ...oh, maybe ... Disordered Seasons Anxiety? Now that we know what it’s like to spend Thanksgiving in a t-shirt and a balmy Christmas afternoon anxiously measuring the daffodils rising from our gardens, what should we hope for in Spring?

I am not alone in mixing myself a bitter cocktail of angst and guilt to wash down this strange “new normal.” The warm weather we had until late January was so disorienting I didn’t do my usual holiday baking; it felt weird to sing carols about Christmas and snow. And yet some dark, icky part of me admitted holiday errands were less of a hassle without the usual snow-packed roads. It was .. easier to head outdoors without heavy winter gear.  It did feel odd not to know what clothes to wear that would “look” like winter, but suit the unseasonable temperatures. I heard people joke that they need a new “global warming wardrobe” – but the joke leaves a sting.

In case you’re wondering – no, I don’t have amnesia. We did have a few hard weeks of winter, in place of the usual months.  After being coddled by a warm December, when the bitter weather finally arrived in late January, part of me felt grumbly about the inconvenience of snow… and the bossy part of me was kicking the grumbly part, saying, “Isn’t this what you wanted? You whined about missing the snow and now that it’s here you can’t take it?” My confession that I sort of enjoyed the warm winter is hard to reconcile with the frightening news of shrinking ice caps, drowning polar bears, and disappearing honey bees. Given all that bad news, some other puritanical part of me thinks we don’t really deserve to be happy about Spring when the winter was so quick, so full of people guiltily enjoying the moderate temperatures while wondering aloud if trees budding in January were a sign of the End Times.

Now, during many of our childhoods, ideas from Rachel Carson’s 1962 ecological treatise, Silent Spring, hung in the air like a dark cloud.  By the 1970s, the climate crisis shaping our nightmares was the newly detected hole in the ozone layer. Perhaps, like me, you are young enough to have learned to read with phonics (instead of Dick and Jane) but just old enough that the phonics card for the letter S pictured a woman spraying a fat can of Aquanet on her beehive hairdo. “That’s right, children, the sound S makes is SSSSSSSsssss ... like hairspray.” Along came the scary news of the hole in the ozone, and, as unthinkable as it was at first, we found we actually could learn to fix our hair and to read without aerosol hairspray.  Along with countries all over the world, we successfully learned a new way of reading the environment.

We’re at another one of those tipping points right now. Are we ready for another leap in ecological literacy? All I know for sure is that I’m not taking anything for granted this Spring. My daffodils stand as a sobering reminder: Half out of the ground since December, they are an idea that was once fresh and green, now brown around the edges – suspended – the future uncertain. Will they bloom? Maybe it’s fitting that it’s no longer a sure thing – that we have to wait to see if nature can still take its course.  I have the same anxious response to the energy-efficient squiggly lightbulbs we now use in our house, which hesitate before lighting up. Every time I flip the switch, that half-second pause gives me pause: Should I assume there will always be energy? This new normal isn’t comfortable, but hopefully the discomfort is instructive.

Rachel Carson warned us over 40 years ago that a “Silent Spring” would only happen if people made it so.  After a weak winter, spring is coming on fast and hot, and I’m listening hard.  This year, every word in the phrase “Hope springs eternal” shimmers uncertainly for me. Does hope spring eternal? Can we be eternally hopeful about Spring?  Listen: [birds] Only if we make it so.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on March 16, 2007
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