Last year during the week before Christmas, we had snow, lots of it – 19 inches in State College. This year, snowdrops – those little white flowers that are the first to emerge from the warming earth.
“They are such a joy to see after a long gray winter,” master gardener Martha Murdock writes for Penn State Extension.
The key word in that sentence is “after.” We are in Just-winter, to adapt e.e. cummings’ way of referring to a season that’s only just begun.
“This can’t be good,” I think as I survey the green shoots poking up around my neighborhood and on campus. At the same time, how do you not enjoy a 65-degree day in December?
Answer: “Postcards from a World on Fire,” the headline on The New York Times’ lead editorial the other day. Click on it and you see an image of an Earth in flames, followed by 193 vignettes from places around the globe that are burning, drowning, melting, sinking, crumbling, sliding, drying up, dying off or emptying out.
Included is a segment where you can enter the name of your county and find out your “top climate change risk.” Here in Centre County it’s hurricanes, followed by floods and fires. The dangers posed by any of the three are slight, though. On a scale of 0 to 100, our hurricane risk is a 10.
Compare that to the threat of flooding in Miami-Dade County: 94/100. Still want to retire to South Florida?
For those of us who are nearing retirement age, Central Pennsylvania’s relative lack of vulnerability to natural disasters is among the reasons to stay put. The joke is that the coast will drown and the name Jersey Shore for the town that’s 40 miles northeast of us in Lycoming County will become a prophecy as the Atlantic Ocean creeps a couple of hundred miles inland.
Probably not in my lifetime, though.
Lest we get too comfortable, tornados like the ones that flattened parts of Kentucky and other states recently seem to be creeping northward and eastward, which does not bode well for our little corner of the world. Already, when the wind blows hard, I picture the Norway spruce in my yard crashing down on my house with me in it. My one little phobia.
And meanwhile, in addition to climate change, there’s COVID change, with dire reports of a surge in cases from the Omicron variant.
I’m supposed to spend Christmas weekend in New York City. I may not. Penn State is supposed to start its Spring 2022 semester the same way it ended Fall 2021 – in the classroom, with masks on. It may not. The latest word from Old Main is that we may begin Spring 2022 the way we ended Spring 2020 — remotely.
Oh, joy. Not that there was a whole lot of joy in the classroom during the semester that just ended. By all accounts, the surge of enthusiasm for live instruction that we saw back in August subsided by the time the leaves fell. College life was somewhat back to normal, but not normal enough to lift students out of their COVID funk.
I remember seeing predictions during Spring 2020 that we could be in pandemic mode for the next two or three years. It was hard to imagine. But here we are.
Hey, I wanted to write a cheery holiday column, I really did. I can run through the whole let’s-count-our-blessings routine – I probably have more than I can count, knock wood – but in my heart of hearts I fear that our wobbly responses to COVID and climate change suggest that our species is hitting a wall, our ability to endlessly adapt finally unable to keep up with what we need to adapt to.
Too many of us are greedy toddlers, not wanting to give up any of our freedoms or privileges, neither for the sake of those around us right now, nor for those who come after us.
I look at the guides to holiday gift-giving that offer alternatives to the purchase of shiny objects and agree with every word: Yes, we should give experiences – subscriptions, memberships, tickets, words, songs, assistance – rather than material goods. Used rather than new. The handmade and heartfelt rather than the store-bought.
But I can’t break the habit of buying presents for my kids as a way of showing them that I love them. As if they don’t know. And why do I want presents when I lack for nothing?
Ah, well. Maybe we’ll wise up before it’s too late.
A good place to start at holiday time is by recognizing how much of our enjoyment of life consists of enjoying either each other or the sensory feast of the physical world – the snow and the snow drops, each in their proper season.
