The Look of Early Spring
Salem, Massachusetts. Most early springs along coastal Massachusetts follow the usual pattern of a few days of intensely bad weather, which are punctuated by days of splendor and warmth: a taste, as it were, of things to come. It is almost as if you are living alongside a relative with a life-threatening sickness that you'll know he or she will get over. It is just a matter of time, patience, and a good deal of endurance before whatever is ailing them is gone.
There are days towards the winter's end and the first few weeks of spring's meridian turn when the sky rains forth pellets of hail out of a charcoal and milk fury of low-flying, southerly or westerly clouds. That same day will sprinkle dashes of sun out of these same clouds, and dust a little snow over you, the fields where green buds struggle up, and on the cobblestone streets where the Hawthornes and Mathers once walked. You'll be buffeted by cold. Then broiled in the warmth. In the glimpse given you the Sun, look for the first greening or yellowing tree, usually in a brick cornice where the Sun's warmth has been gathering and the tree has been protected from the wind.
Since no one really knows why the weather is so turbulent with the flip-flops associated with coastal living (often in a single day) -especially in the season shifts - the metaphors we use to describe their advents are often relegated to poetic description. These are just a little less accurate than the weather report. In this regard we have not come so far as Pliny the Elder's natural history and Ovid's poetry as we'd like to think. Such ignorance has many practical, terrible ramifications for population and industrial growth in the long run and it is a problem that haunts us in -and into - the Space Age.
Though the weather along coastal places is often changeable - interestingly so - why furiously rough weather flips with mild weather in these times has many interesting possibilities, For one, the Sun is getting more intense, with longer daylight ratios than the first days of winter. Are ionized particles and the attendant increase in electromagnetic activity to blame, in part? Do these activities suddenly hail the dispersal of static winter air patterns, and the excitation caused by the Sun, increase the force of the last winter blasts of air from colder zones (higher north, off the coast?) that are locked into eddies (ie, layers of severely cold air enveloped in warmer ones, called thermoclines)? Do radiation transfers do something, as well as the return of decreased ozone?
Latest Articles