Peter Bougie

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Mark Twain said that, I think, or Will Rogers, or maybe H. L. Mencken; one of those cranks. Perhaps it was Spiro Agnew – remember him? – in one his diatribes against weather forecasters. “Snow, sch-mo,” he said. That was during the days of the Vietnam War, Watergate, runaway inflation, and nuclear proliferation. It was a more innocent time.

(Note: don’t Google any of this. Please see the Disclaimer at the end of the post.)

It has been a beautiful spring here in the upper Midwest. The weather began to warm as if on cue around the first of March. It was like a door opened and winter left, while spring came in and set up shop and proceeded with its work in steady increments. Temperatures were, on the whole, above average. We have received regular rainfalls, all followed by an almost literally perceptible swelling of green growing things. Budding trees and flowering plants were all a few weeks ahead of schedule. Temperatures cooled to more normal levels at the end of April, slowing the budding and flowering and thus allowing us to enjoy them a little longer.

However, during the last few days of this first week of May, we have endured a stretch of cooler weather. Our forecast held true in all its details yesterday. It rained in the early morning and the late morning, at lunchtime and after lunch, at mid afternoon and in the late afternoon. It rained all day, just as the forecasters said it would. The high of 45 was not much different than the low of 43 of the night before, just like they predicted. We were left to hope that the next part of the forecast, the one to two inches of snow to come in the very early hours of Saturday, would not come to pass. I could not help but reluctantly recall times in the past when it has snowed in May. I remember well the ten inches we got in Minneapolis on May 9th or 10th, 1984. See, I even marked the date (more or less) in my mind, 26 years ago, so I could repeat it to unbelieving ears in my senility. It piled up in wet slushy heaps, and some of it was still around a couple of days later. No, wait - it didn’t melt until Memorial Day. I mean Father’s Day.

The prospect of snow in May is very discouraging, even though you know it won’t last long, even when March and April have been as kind to us as they were this year. You realize that, living in this area, you are subject to the possibility of snow about 8-1/2 to 9 months of the year, and you kind of feel like all those years when it didn’t snow in May, or September or October or April – this year, it didn’t even snow in March - were just a sort of sucker’s delusion intended to soften you so that when the blow came, the reality of snow in May, the real world borne in like sharp splinters of ice driven into your heart by rockets, it would hurt all the more.

The relieved anticlimax is that we received no snow last night. Oh, I heard that some rooftops out in the countryside were dusted with it, but even that did not survive the dawn. So, don’t go counting your disappointments or disasters before they occur. I always say.

Late breaking news: Nora has just come in and informed me that we’ll have to haul all those plants in again tonight, because they are predicting clear skies and frost. Hey, I remember in ’91 or ’92, when it froze on the 20th of June. Really. Cornstalks fell over in the fields as if gunned down, and baby birds dropped like feathered ice cubes from their nests…

[Disclaimer: I don’t really think Will Rogers was a crank, or even Mark Twain, although Mencken could qualify. Spiro Agnew didn’t really say “Snow, sch-mo,” at least not on the record. It did freeze hard in this area around the 20th of June in one of the years mentioned, or thereabouts, and some corn was damaged, although it didn’t fall over – it’s not very tall yet in June - and I don’t recall hearing anything about baby birds, but I certainly hope none were harmed.

Above all, the early seventies were not really a more innocent time.]