My Two Writing Teachers colleagues and I are hosting the 14th Annual March Slice of Life Story Challenge, in which teachers from around the world participate in posting a story per day.
March is supposed to come in like a lion and out like a lamb, right?
Not where I live. Not this year, anyway.
We’ve had a stretch of unusually warm and sunny weather through the middle of March. Nearly all our snow melted, leaving ski areas with just a few trails left, and everyone wondering how much longer they can stay open. For some people, the warm weather has been a welcome sign of spring, and with vaccines on the way, I think the warm weather has also had the effect of bringing people out of their homes and gathering together more. For a few days, it felt like “normal” life was coming soon.
For me, I’m always a little sad at the end of winter. The melting snow signals the end of a season I love, and the beginning of a long drawn out mud season. Spring in Vermont is cold and grey. The snow melt turns everything into mud. While states just a little to the south get green grass and daffodils, we usually don’t see flowers until much later—or if they do bloom early they wind up getting killed in an early spring snow storm.
Today the snow returned. As I write this, I’m looking out my living room window and the wind is whipping the trees, and big flakes of snow are dusting the ground. A spike in covid-19 cases, along with the spread of the new variant of the virus has sobered people’s moods about gathering (though it remains to be seen if it will change people’s behaviors quickly enough). Vermont set a record for its highest number of new cases in a day just last week. The snow is a reminder that winter in Vermont is long—and just when you think it’s ending, it’s not.
Just like the pandemic. Don’t be fooled by a few sunny days. We still have a long way to go.