Written beside Black Pond, Windsor NH 02/29/24

The last day of February, and already a warm breeze invites me to remove my coat. Just last week the dog and I were walking on the lake, leaving footprints on the ice, through the marsh and back again. Now after days of relative warmth, highs in the 50’s and sunny, the thinnest ice at the shore has melted and open water shows in pools across the pond. The slope I sit on, south-facing, has felt the sun first and is already bare. Already the season of ice is over, impatient spring softening the ground too soon.

I spent my youth beside this pond. I remember those winters, our traditions – my siblings and I would cross the ice on New Year’s Day, to the island in the middle and the old cabin there, decomposing and covered in graffiti. We’d to add our names to it, leave another tally-mark – but you could not do that this year. The pond was much slushy water on January 1st. Used to be an ice-house or two each season, people snowmobiling and ice-fishing – but no one put their shelters out this year. No one can trust the weather anymore.

Some neighbors embrace the warming world. Most adults I know share a popular distaste for snow, for the obstacle it is to routine. Nearly everyone here lives some distance from their place of work, many miles requiring some mode of transportation, and snow is not so kind to our machines. So we begin to resent the cold. Other animals acquiesce to winter, fatten themselves and close the blinds and wait for spring. Humans did too, for a time. Now we stand opposed to all forces of disruption, including the seasons and their weather.

Humans are winning. The winter of 23 – 24 was the second warmest in NH history. The fifth warmest was last year. Five months ago the USDA updated their maps to reflect these changing seasons. In the not-so-distant future, every year will compete to be the hottest year on record. And what will the pond look like then?

Stay still long enough and you begin to see things as they are, and as they change. Season onto season onto season, little truths sprout and flower and fade. If we witness them, if we attempt to understand them, we begin to engage in relationship with the land.

So often here it is freezing one week, humid the next and then back to freezing again. In this environment the natural order comes undone. Insects sensing spring wake too soon, start multiplying in pools of melted water, and then are flash-frozen overnight. There will be less bugs this year, and humans will celebrate; meanwhile the bottom of the food chain shrinks, meaning harder times for the rest of the forest.

By contrast, other invasive insects are thriving in the ecological chaos. The Southern Pine Bore, which normally would not survive our frigid winters, has taken advantage of the warming and moved north. If winters keep getting warmer and the bore is allowed to multiply, we may see a disappearance of the White Pine from New Hampshire. We may see it in our lifetime.

“It used to snow so much,” we will say to the children. “So much we used to climb the snow drifts onto the roof of the house, and ice so thick we walked across the whole lake.” “That’s cool,” they’ll say, or maybe not – but they will only imagine it. When I and my generation are gone, so goes the memory of winter, sometimes that’s how I feel.

I don’t want to be fatalistic or pessimistic or future-obsessed. I want to be present and alive, and if this really is the tipping point then I want to enjoy the seasons while they last. Still I am paying attention, looking for the little signs, trying to imagine my home in the not-so-distant future.