Here we are at the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. The length of daylight hours in the northern hemisphere grows longer. The famous prognosticators are back - Phil and Chuck and Kate and Sam and many more. What did they say on this very cold morning?
I'm thinking of our very own backyard groundhog - chubby and busy and happy to enjoy the grasses and flowers and explore the roadsides and meadows and farmland.
Today many of our favorite weather prognosticators promised an early spring. They didn't see their shadows. Time will tell if they're right or wrong Statistics show that Punxsutawney Phil is correct only 39 percent of the time.
Our January snow has melted overnight. Yet its image comes clearly to mind as I remember that January 25th is Virginia Woolf's birthday. She wrote numerous times about snow and I think often about this passage from "The Years." "The Years" (1937) was the last novel she published in her lifetime.
"It was January. Snow was falling. Snow had fallen all day. The sky spread like a grey goose wing which feathers were falling all over England. The sky was nothing but a flurry of falling flakes. Lanes were levelled: hollows filled; the snow clogged the streams; obscured windows, and lay wedged against doors. There was a faint murmur in the air, a slight crepitation, as if the air itself was turning to snow; otherwise all was silent, save when a sheep coughed, snow flopped from a branch, or slipped in an avalanche down some roof in London. Now and again a shaft of light spread slowly across the sky as a car drove through the muffled roads. But as the night wore on, snow covered the wheel ruts; softened to nothingness the marks of the traffic, and coated monuments, palaces and statues with a thick vestment of snow."
Today's groundhog predictions from various locations seem to contradict each other. Some groundhogs saw their shadow and some did not. We're going with Punxsutawney Phil's prediction. He's right about 80% of the time and he saw his shadow today.
It's February 2nd and the lights and cameras await the emergence of our beloved groundhogs once again. While he (or she) is credited with the ability to forecast the weather for the next six weeks, it's an unfortunate fact that the groundhog is right about that only about half of the time. But there is one thing that our furry friend always gets right. The groundhog tells us that the hours of daylight are growing longer in the northern hemisphere. Earth is tilting on its axis and we are on our way to spring and summer.
Here's groundhog on a summer day.
The tangible horrors of that clear blue morning fell from the sky and remain with those who witnessed them unmediated by television and technology. We struggle to attain moral comprehension in our endless retellings of our experiences that day.
