Ah March! How eagerly we await it as we look for signs of spring between blasts of freezing winds and occasional warm days. On one windy day in mid-March, the first returning turkey vulture flies along Sapsucker Ridge. A calm, warm day brings back a singing field sparrow or eastern phoebe. As the earth thaws, […]
Category: Climate Change
The Longest Autumn
Every autumn the first hard frost comes later. Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, when we were engaged in intensive gardening, we could expect a hard frost in the first week of October. Gradually, as the years passed, the hard frost date arrived in the second week. Then, in this century, it moved into […]
Early Spring
Instead of April showers last year, we had unprecedented heat. On April 2, it was 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Flowers and trees bloomed days and even weeks ahead of records I’ve been keeping since 1971. By the middle of the month, we had a May woods. Even the mayapples bloomed in April. During the first half […]
October snow
“Nanna, it’s snowing!” My first thought was, no, it can’t be. It’s only the fifteenth of October. We’ve never had snow this early. Why, last year our first frost was October 19. Surely it won’t last, this spring onion snow in October. Big, fat flakes fell and Elanor, our four-year-old granddaughter, and her Uncle Dave […]
Marcia Bonta 