Enough of excuses

Enough of November already.

Look, this is just getting to be too, too much. In Minnesota no month deserves to be 90 days long – and if any one month did, it ought to be June. But here we are – chill, damp, bleakly brown. Day after day, week after week we’ve awakened to weather with no redeeming qualities save for discouraging untrammeled Pollyannaism and supporting the profits of purveyors of spirituous beverages. Day after day, week after week of dispiriting gloom – punctuated by tantalizing glimpses of sunshine and blue sky, but only enough to deepen the overweening climatological malaise that is most generally soothed only by Netflix and the sound of the pizza guy on the porch.

To get all Shakespearian about it, this is the season of our discontent. When it rains in January there is something not right with the world. We fear that the planets themselves have misaligned; the earth come untethered; the cosmos having somehow lost its familiar shape. Days that should not have seen the mercury rise above zero haven’t cooled below freezing. What snow there is lingers in crusted Aprilesque clumps; dirty, depressing reminders that we’re locked in a weather pattern that better suits Missouri than Minnesota.

It feels – weatherwise – that something is rotten, and not just in the state of Denmark. Rotten in the state of Minnesot, and Wisconsin, and California, and, well, the world in general.

When it’s the middle of January and the temperature has yet to drop to zero – something is out of kilter.

I guess it’s a lesson in being careful about what we wish for.

I’ve never been a winter kind of guy. As a child notably stubby of stature, the depth of a serious winter snowfall often exceeded the length of my inseam – so while other kids romped, I was left sort of treading snow. Attempts at winter sports invariably left me wet, cold and profoundly uncomfortable, with melting snow packed into improbable anatomical recesses at the end of every elementary school recess. I came to an early opinion that climatic conditions that had the potential to turn my corporeal being into so much rock-hard, inanimate matter posed a very real and profound threat to my well being, and that storm windows, central heating, and thick books perused under  thick blankets were the best known antidotes to the perils posed by the higher latitudes in the northern hemisphere.

Come to think of it, they still are…

But as a child I wished for more than that. I hadn’t made it out of elementary school when I first learned that scientists were predicting that thanks to all the coal, oil, wood and other stuff we were burning, the world would be getting warmer in the foreseeable future. Now for a chilblained boy in southeast Minnesota, the prospect of winter without shoveling snow or slogging off to school in the face of life-threatening wind-chill factors was a sweet thought indeed. The thought of toes staying toasty from Halloween straight through to Easter was darn near irresistible.

With a 10-year-old’s understanding, had I known of the Koch brothers, I would have been among their biggest fans.

But then my vision of climate change didn’t include an endless November.

Today, despite the space heater whirring away beneath my desk, my toes are still cold.

Add in fires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and a recurring Noahacian deluge and this warmer world doesn’t seem to be turning out the way I’d imagined it would be.

Somehow it never occurred to me that there would come a time when Glacier National Park would simply be National Park…

But then, what can you expect from a 10-year-old kid?

The President is 72. What’s his excuse?