Okay, so it’s gotten way too cold way too early. And I feel like I’ve shoveled two tire track paths down the driveway about 200 hundred times in the past week.
The normal pattern around here is 2 very cold weeks starting mid-to-late January. And a fair amount of cold and snow sporadically after that. Several winters here lately haven’t really even gotten around to winter. Temperatures in the 30s and 40s, the normal gray skies. Was it last year that was such a sunny winter? Felt more like Boulder, where it snows and then the sun comes out. And two years ago I was out on the patio in bare feet to take some veggie scraps to the compost heap – on Christmas Eve.
I think it’s been quite a while since we had a normal winter. And given the confusion in the seasons we’ve been seeing, let’s agree to call it climate change and not global warming. Everything seems to be out of its normal order.
The nice thing about this past cold spell, of course, is that the number of bugs around next summer will be way down. But I’m not even sure that’s a blessing, except for mosquitos. I’ve only seen one June bug in the past 10 years, and one staghorn beetle. Where have all the bugs gone? The cabbage moths seem to be reliable in my garden, darn it, but not much else. It’s all weird, isn’t it?