"O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?"
Fun fact about these blog posts: you can't save them into a folder for future use. The only way to preserve them, outside of continuing to pay for this subscription and hoping the company doesn't go bust, is to copy and paste each one into a Word document. There are nearly a thousand posts on this blog. I reckon I'll save that project for when I truly retire.
Yesterday arrived warmer than usual, but windy. By midday the snow arrived, falling in fat flakes and getting whipped off the roofs outside my window by gusts that approached gale force, while the temperature plummeted into the low 20s.
This morning it was 40 when P left for work, still and utterly snowless except for a couple patches out in the yard. Tomorrow morning it's supposed to be 15, followed by low 40s on Friday and a Saturday afternoon that never breaks 30.
There's a word for this crazy, up-and-down weather, for the flash snow showers and howling winds and sweater afternoons. Spring. It's acting like Spring in the Southern Tier, in the last week of January. We're at least two months ahead of schedule.
And back home, the annual pollen drop comes earlier every year. Back when I arrived in the panhandle in 1991, you could count on lots of sneezing and yellow dusted cars in early March. Last year it was already happening by now, and I bet it's happening again as I write this.
An upstate New Yorker will flash you a look of disdain if you express concern that it's not freezing and snowy during this dreariest time of year. But it seems cause for concern, a sign that the seasons and cycles of life are falling out of whack as winter effaces and we live one long spring and summer.
It's started to snow lightly outside, but the ground is too warm for it to stick.
Meanwhile, President Spanky McLiarface froze Medicaid payments last night, then sent his chipmunk cheeked young Press Secretary out to suggest that perhaps it was some unspecified technical issue. But for the fact that they froze grants and most business loans the day before, and invited literally the entire federal workforce to resign a couple hours after that, one might give them the benefit of the doubt.
Actually, I can't believe I just wrote that. Why would anyone believe anything these people are saying?
If the rule of law holds, much of the mischief of the last ten days since the coup will be enjoined and ultimately struck down. It's already happened in two courtrooms in the last week. But will Dirty Don ignore the rulings?
Old, mature me thinks we just need to ride this thing out, and wait for the midterms to remove his congressional enablers and for his own term to end. But can this country bear nearly four more years of this? And how confident are we that he'll actually leave without a toe tag? He's said twice in the last three days that he's considering staying, comments treated as a "joke" by the press as it whistles past the graveyard.
My less patient self thinks the free states ought to band together and simply opt out of this failed political experiment, sort of a Lysistrata but with their tax dollars. What would happen if the Pacific Coast and the Northeast simply wished the rest of the country the best, formed their own confederation, and started keeping all that wealth at home rather than sending their tax dollars to subsidize failed experiments like Louisiana? For years, the South has been sticking it to Mass and NY and California, luring away industry and business development with lower taxes made possible by the fact that Mass and NY and California are subsidizing them. Why not keep that money where it was earned, and let Mississippi sink or swim as Mississippi?
You may say I'm a dreamer . . .
Enjoying the gloom of this home office at Tara this morning. The realtor's photographer will be here this afternoon to take photos for the MLS listing. Already starting to say goodbye in my heart. Nothing lasts forever.
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