March 28, 2009
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I’m participating anyway.
Here are the questions for the latest Kween_of_the_Queens challenge:
How do the mild days and freshness of spring affect your mood and outlook on life?
Does Spring make you hopeful of good things to come?
When winter ends and spring begins, do you really notice the transformation of life happening all around you?
What do you notice the most?I’ll start with the last one first: I notice the longer days and shorter nights. Every year around this time, I notice that it’s no longer dark at 9 PM. That might give a false impression of our day length, if you don’t know about the peculiar time zone situation in Alaska. For political and commercial purposes, all 3 of our natural time zones were squeezed into one, and are offset only 1 hour from Pacific Time. Here, the sun is highest in the sky (true noon) about 2 PM.
As of last week, we are getting more daylight than everyone south of us, and at 62° North latitude, practically the whole civilized world is south of us. Our days are growing longer, but only by a few minutes each day. In the dark months we feel deprived, starved for light. In the six months after the Vernal Equinox, we have the smug satisfaction of knowing that we are, compared to the rest of the planet, rich in light. This is, after all, the Land of the Midnight Sun.
“When winter ends and spring begins, do you really notice the transformation of life happening all around you?”
Oh, no, certainly not. When winter officially ends and spring begins, in March, winter isn’t over for us. The brief and ugly season that passes for spring here, the one we call “breakup” because it’s when the ice breaks up on the lakes and rivers, is not really beginning here yet, but there are a few signs that it is not far away.
The woodpile is much diminished, close to all mined out. This has been a cold winter and we went through a lot of firewood.
In the daytime, the crust on the snowpack softens and my feet sink in. It’s not quite slush yet, because the nights are still freezing, down near zero Fahrenheit most nights. It will be slush, sooner or later, before it becomes mud.
There are also some signs that we’ve still got a ways to go:
The sky is gray and the trees are bare
Snow on the north side of the house is piled to the roof.I’ll tackle the other two questions in tandem:How do the mild days and freshness of spring affect your mood and outlook on life?
Does Spring make you hopeful of good things to come?Maybe I have already conveyed the idea that “mild” and “fresh” are not exactly happening right here and now. So… are my moods subject to the weather? No, and isn’t that fortunate for me under the circumstances? I know that Earth resting under the snow is just as “good” as it will be in June when it starts growing and greening up obscenely fast to make up for lost time. I’m as happy on a brilliant blue and white winter day as I am on those days when the forest looks like green walls all around me.
What I wasn’t asked, but am going to tell you anyway, is that I’m a lot more physically comfortable when it is 50°F outside than when it is 50°F inside. However, before we get there, we have to slog through the mud and slush of breakup, and endure the pollen assault when the trees all bloom at once. We will have a few glorious weeks in June when it doesn’t get dark, but being inclined to remembering when I might be better off forgetting, the midnight sun always reminds me that when the days are their longest they’re about to start getting shorter again.
Comments (7)
Where I’m from, we don’t really have Spring either. We have two coldish weeks of Winter, and then it seems like Summer takes over.
This was my first challenge, and obviously it wasn’t very good, or catered to the masses. So I’ll work on that. I always like your pictures though.
Thanks for participating. You’ve been linked.
Our days are longer, but our weather is iffy at best this time of year. We went from unseasonably cold a couple weeks ago to tornados earlier this week… now back to unseasonable cold… with a blizzard just south of us. (As if that somehow makes sense?)
Mother Nature is fickle bitch.
Where do you get your firewood from?
@the_tramp - I buy it from an old guy who gets it from land being cleared for construction. So far, ever since I moved here in 1983, road construction, a big electrical intertie between Anchorage and Fairbanks, and new houses, schools, and businesses, have provided plenty of wood. Somebody just needs to cut it up and haul it away to burn before it rots. That’s the birch, the good firewood. There is also an abundant supply of standing dead spruce everywhere, killed by beetles. We’ve cut up some of that ourselves.
@SuSu - We had to cut down a large pecan tree here, and our neighbour also had to remove one. We had the tree-felling folks leave the pieces small enough for me to deal with (up to 16″ diameter, more-or-less). It’s hard labour dealing with them, so I figured it would be tough for you guys to fell and split enough each year to carry you through the winter. I might have enough left to split to get me through next winter (nice, short warm NC winter) but then I’ll be looking.
@the_tramp -
Lucky you. Pecan, any hardwood, makes good fires. Our forests are “new” and soft, and, of course, no fruitwood or nut trees. Poplar is abundant here: rots too quickly to be good for building, and nearly fireproof. Besides that, it’s so invasive it’s the #1 “weed” around here, and yanking a little sprout out of the garden is likely to dump a person on her butt when it lets go.
Breakup, hummm. Makes me glad that I live in such mild weather (well, if you consider 100 plus in the summer as mild!)~Jeri