SIGNS OF SPRING

It was one of those old fashioned winters we haven't had here since, well, the kind we had around here when I was a kid. With snow on the ground almost from beginning to end. Beautiful.

And now with Spring only days away, the transition is happening in that same old fashioned way, with the last bits of snow being washed away by rain or melted away by warmer temperatures and sunny skies.

But there are still signs of climate weirding (caused by "climate warming" but it's too difficult a concept for some, particularly and most obviously rightwingers to get that when you trace a line created by average temperatures over centuries, there's a steeper and steeper incline towards the end of the 20th that continues to ascend into the present, but because that impacts the weather worldwide in different ways, more moisture more snow in some areas etc. it baffles these people into the "see, it's cold where I am so ipso facto no warming" et-endlessly-cetera).

Like when I took a walk in the local park today under brilliantly blue skies and saw the snow was all gone where it had been only days ago (and had the weather last weekend been cold enough to cause the rainstorm to have been a snowstorm we would have gotten over three and a half feet of snow! as it was winds were clocked at over seventy-five (75!) miles an hours at times and caused some deaths in nearby Jersey towns and many uprooted trees etc. including minor damage here and there like on the front porch of my apartment where two year-round, screwed-in screens were ripped from the porch and from their frames and tossed around the neighborhood)

I also saw signs of spring like the duck pond being thawed out and some ducks floating in it and the sound of familiar birds from my childhood as I walked under the still bare branches of the variety of trees they planted to create this lovely park. Until under one tree I had to look up because I heard screeching that seemed familiar and yet out of place at the same time, and there was one of the many green parrots that make Northern New Jersey their home now and have since the "global warming" trend started rising more rapidly in the last decade.

Now that's nothing like the old fashioned springtime thaw of my boyhood. Nobody from Jersey in my time was accustomed to hearing the sound of screeching parrots in New Jersey! But my youngest is. I mentioned I saw one today and it was like old news. Oh yeah, the parrots. They're always in that tree dad. At twelve years old he's never known the Northeast USA to be parrrotless.

[And as I've pointed out in other posts about this in previous seasons, these are not freed pets as some rightwingers like to picture it, these are parrots native to Mexico that have slowly made their way North as temperatures have risen, just as Spring comes earlier and summer stays longer (on average my rightwing friends, you remember that concept from grammar school?) every year, giving them more and more reason to either move further North each year and/or return earlier.]