After lackluster winter, signs of spring are here
At the start of this month, the ice on my summer swimming hole was singing like a humpback whale.
It’s melted now and the wind is pushing the water around.
Instead of frozen groans and whoops, I’m listening to birds piping and whistling when I get up in the morning. There are crocuses filling up the bank in front of my house — pastels poking past the brown leaves I didn’t rake up last fall.
There were three redshouldered hawks circling the blue sky above me last week, declaring they were back in town. The rhubarb is starting to show.
And it’s officially spring on Sunday — the vernal equinox, when the river bank talks of the waters of March (it’s the promise of life, it’s the joy in your heart.) After two years of COVID waves, a new, dreadful war, and a cold gray winter, we want as much as ever to hear the songs, see the world made new.
“We’ve been living with grays and browns,” said Eugene Reelick, owner of Hollandia Nurseries in Bethel, where customers have been trooping in to tour its 25 greenhouses and buy flats of glowing pansies and pots of yellow daffodils. ”People want color. They’re excited this year.”
If you’re a meteorologist, you would say spring starts on March 1 — winter for weather watchers begins on Dec. 1 and runs to the last dreary day of February.
If you’re a traditionalist, you follow solstice and equinox. The start of winter is the longest night of the year. Spring begins when light and dark divide things halfsies. That’s today — when the sun touches the equator as the tilting earth orbits around it. It will come again on Sept. 22, the autumnal equinox. Time to look back.
The winter we had was warm in December, cold in January — no thaw this year — and about average for February.
As winters go, it wasn’t particularly snowy. Unlike eastern Connecticut, the western half of the state was blizzard-less. You may have dreamed of a white Christmas but December looks askance at that.
Matt Spies, state coordinator of CoCoRaHS — the volunteer Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network — said he measured about 24 inches of snow from December to mid-March at his weather station in Brookfield.
“There were a couple of six inches storms, a handful of one-two-three inch storms.’’ Spies said. “There were really no snow events in December.
“January and February were on the colder side,” said Bill Jacquemin, chief meteorologist at the Connecticut Weather Center in Danbury. “But the air was so dry, there wasn’t much snow.”
Gary Lessor, director of The Weather Center at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, said the track of coastal storms this past winter stayed mostly south and east of the state. (The memorable storm of the year — the blizzard on Jan. 28-29 — which hit eastern Connecticut, Rhode Island and coastal Massachusetts hard, was pretty much an everyday snowfall in Fairfield and Litchfield counties.)
But Lessor said this cold, somewhat dry winter came at a cost — western Connecticut was down 4.6 inches of precipitation compared to an average winter. We will need April showers this year.
“We’re still in the normal range for precipitation,” Lessor said. “But southeastern New York and parts of southeastern Pennsylvania are now listed as abnormally dry. Southern New Jersey is listed as a being in a drought.”
If winter was untrustworthy, spring can hang you up as well.
Kathleen Nelson, of New Milford and a member of the volunteer Mad Gardeners, said that, nowadays, the first things that turn all green and verdant on the landscape are probably non-native invasive species like barberry, Japanese honeysuckle and multiflora rose.
“They leaf out early,” Nelson
said. “You look at them and say ‘How wonderful…spring is coming.’ And in the fall, it seems like it’s just the reverse — they’re the last to lose their leaves.’”
And there is the threat of sudden slaps in the face to come.
Jacquemin of the Connecticut Weather Center said forecasts show there could be a sudden plunge in temperature at the end of March. Think wind chills again.
“It looks like Mother Nature and Old Man Winter are going to have a good laugh on us,” he said.
Reelick of Hollandia Nurseries said that’s to be expected.
“It happens every year,” Reelick said. “We get cold snaps in March and April. Welcome to New England.”