The weather’s been a bit unusual in the last week. When I woke up this morning and took out the dogs, it felt clammy outside. It was 74 degrees in my backyard this afternoon. It felt more like a late May day than late March. The last time the weather felt like this in March was the year St. Peter got flattened by a tornado.
When you get heat, wind, and humidity together with a cold front, you get conditions that are ripe for a tornado. Even if it is March — when we should be buried in snow. We had a tornado watch this afternoon, and a funnel cloud was spotted in the next county. I was showing Sarah what the hook echo looked like on the NWS website, just before the radar portion of the site went down. So much for that real-time science lesson.
John and Rachel inspected the yard this afternoon. The new cherry tree is putting out buds, as are the rose bushes. And then there are the tulips. They are all up at least two inches high. These are tulips that are supposed to bloom in late April. At the rate things are growing, I will have tulips close to Easter.
All this has made me even grumpier about the climate change naysayers. Something is happening — and the change has happened very quickly in the last ten years or so. This is not the Minnesota weather of my childhood — or of the childhoods of my elders. There’s not alot I can do to change that. I do work to be more green, and frequently fail. But I try. I try to teach my girls to try, too.
At church lately we have been talking alot about our personal frustration with “being just one person that can’t make much impact”. The Margaret Mead quote about one person being the only thing that makes a difference gets used alot. It doesn’t help. But, we have recently realized that maybe if all us “just one” persons get together, maybe we can make an impact together. Now we are working to find ways to make that difference, together.
I don’t know if it will change things with the tulips and tornadoes. But at least I can say, I’m trying.