"The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house. All that cold, cold wet day."
~ Dr. Seuss
It has been a very wet and very cold spring. The evening weather forecasters delight in crooning about this record or that record being broken in regard to low temperatures or high rainfall amounts. Sunny days are boring for them. They like the drama of unusual weather, the excitement of predicting the unexpected. Like Cassandra, we ignore them at our peril. The locals do say that this is an unusually wet and cold spring. But with all the climate change events around the world I fear that this may be a new normal.
Actually, in truth, I feel that we, ourselves, are starting to fit in to a local tradition of whinging about the weather, like all country folk do. About how the wet means you can't get tractors into the field to plant. Or that you have to now plant a different crop - one that doesn't take so long to grow. Or that our neighbour's cows were put on our pasture so late this year because the pasture was too wet. It still is. But they had run out of hay, for one. And secondly, the cows have become cranky and troublesome because they are so craving green feed. We heard the bull next door spend most of one afternoon kicking the wall of the barn that he had been cooped up in all winter, bellowing and thumping his need to get on pasture.
We are at least a month behind in building the infrastructure for our gardens and for the farm in general - let alone actually planting plants and trees and such. We have now to find more ways of controlling the water runoff from the mountain than merely using rain barrels. Now we talk of digging swales and ditches and, as a water assessor said of our hay pasture, perhaps even converting said hay field to wetland. Which would not be such a bad idea. In fact, quite laudable and certainly a boon for all the ducks and herons and turtles and frogs and snakes and birds that are in need of such wetland as more and more land gets turned into crops. But I do wish that it was a choice rather than what may be a necessity.
Each week, I wash and fold and put away the heavier sweaters and winter socks. And before the week is out they are back in circulation again. I feel like an onion, several layers worn over several layers - the layers always added, rarely taken away. I am ALWAYS cold.
Hanging laundry is somewhat of a game of cat and mouse. I sneak out and hang my laundry on the line, hoping that the sky gods do not notice and haul in the thick cumulous clouds, heavy with rain. I study the sky throughout the day hoping for enough weak sun and wind to dry and take the clothes back down before the rain falls. I don't always win, ending up drying the clothes draped over furniture in the house after all.
The hens, too, are sick of the cold and rain. They spend most of those days huddled under the pine trees, their heads scrunched down into their shoulders, alternating between standing on one cold foot and then the other. They look wet and scruffy and are the epitome of the term 'mad as a wet hen'. Their favourite dust-bath place, mixed with diatomaceous earth to help with lice, becomes a soupy mess as it turns to yellow gunk. So instead they pick and nibble at their skin and feathers, muttering and scowling.
Frost advisories have become an evening norm. The nights still remain much too cold. The cold creeps in under the barely open window and curls on the sill like a cat. Every once in awhile it reaches out its arctic paw and chills an exposed toe or the end of a nose. The fog that forms overnight breathes its frigid breath on the upper windows leaving them fog-licked and opaque in the morning light.
But I am truly sick of the rain and the cold. As temperatures have not risen and the threat of impending rainfall is checked compulsively on my phone app several times a day, my mood deteriorates. I know BC and Alberta are already dealing with horrendous forest fires and will be dealing with them all summer long. I know several southern states in the US are already sweltering in killer heat waves. What we are dealing with is small in comparison. But I reserve the right to complain about this unusual spring. Because it is not what we bargained for. One neighbour has stated that she was seriously afraid that we would move away from our new-found home because of this spring. We won't. We are in for the long haul, weather warts and all.
This cold rainy spring puts me in mind of an old Ray Bradbury story called The Long Rain. The story is set on Venus in a jungle where a group of men whose rocket crashed there are attempting to reach a Sun Dome and dryness and warmth. But this Venus has nearly eternal rains. Eventually the men either die as a result of their lungs filling up with rain or are driven mad by the sound of the incessant rainfall.
The opening paragraph describes the rain of Venus thusly: "It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a muzzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping in the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains."
If we were to replace "sweating and steaming rain" with the Scottish word "yowe-tremmle" (literally ewe-tremble), which is a word to describe unusually cold and rainy weather late in the spring that is cold enough to make the freshly-shorn ewes tremble, then we would certainly have the right description to describe this cold spring at Fat Hummingbird Farm on the planet of Clarence.
Maybe the sun will shine tomorrow.
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