💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 5-18.gmi captured on 2024-05-26 at 14:54:36. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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After 2021/2022's record snow, with our second-hand, decades-old snowblower dying for good shortly after we got back from visiting my partner's parents out west, I ponied up and got a new model. And then: this last mild winter. One really big dump of snow (the snowblower made quick work of it), and then...nothing. I had to shovel a bit, but not nearly as much as the previous winter. That winter, I tweaked my back, badly, around New Year 2022. This year, I've so far got off easy.
The mild winter became a long, cold spring. Grey days, no rain, little hint of sun. While my social media feeds showed crocuses and daffodils far south of here, the snow continued its gradually melt, only pulling back for good in mid-April. A couple weeks ago, the weather turned again. The forsythias blossomed, the irises' green began to peek out, and the marsh birds returned, hovering around our feeder, picking out seeds.
And now, the smoke. The seemingly ever-present wildfires. Smoke which was almost never present growing up, and which seems to return every summer now. An ominous reminder of our times. Sometimes the sky a muted blue. Some days the air hazy; some days you can taste it. Yesterday morning, that characteristic red sun. Like something out of a dystopian sci-fi, I tell myself, making sure I don't stop too long to think through the implications.
I go running under that red sun early in the morning, when it's still cool. Come home, shower, and start my work. I'm grateful this house has AC. I never had it growing up in my three-story, turn-of-the-20th-century house in my childhood hometown. Summers were sweltering and intense. I remember spending the worst nights in the cool dampness of our basement, lying on the hide-a-bed with its back-breaking bar, trying to get some sleep.
Where I live, both AC and a good furnace are a necessity. The temperature swings hard both ways. Running season is really only about six months, unless you like running in snow and ice, which I don't. Six months, plus or minus a few weeks. But all this is changing. All my usual assumptions are changing. Winters are becoming much more variable. Summers a smoky haze. We're watching bad things happen in slow motion. New trends forming. There's a desire for action, but interests preventing that. I've been thinking about this for decades, since we were talking about "global warming" in the 90s. Now I'm thinking darker thoughts: how much time do we have left? Where are the best places to live? I think where I am should be relatively good. What sort of preparations should I begin to take? The pandemic, especially the early days, driving home the importance of having a few weeks, or more, of the essentials. Starting to wonder what's needed. Wondering too, in a dying age, how much is too much.