It’s the question on everyone’s mind: Can we have spring without winter?
To be specific, it’s the stupid question on everyone’s mind. Of course we can have spring. But do we feel as if we earned it?
Yes, in the sense that the balance sheet is not reset every year. I remember a year when a cold snap killed the blossoms on my flowering trees — it rained and froze, and they fell to the earth. Instead of five days of transitory beauty, I got three, and I was furious.
I shook my fist at the heavens to curse Mother Earth — which is ridiculous, but you look noble when you do that, and silly when you appear to be arguing with the ground, where Mother Earth would be. “You owe us for that! You owe us!”
But of course there is no Mother Earth, standing in a forest, ready to smite us for mistaking margarine for butter. Good thing, too, or we’d always be wondering if she was mad at us. Warm weather in February? She’s irked. Setting us up. She’s going to blast us with a foot of snow in May because we said we’d compost and we didn’t.
If she was real, we’d be bothering her all the time with supplications. The ancient Romans believed that Jove, also known as Jupiter, was the god in charge of the weather, so you’d keep him happy with sacrifices. I imagine a Roman couple heading out on a weekend vacation, and the wife asks the husband if he sacrificed a lamb to ensure good weather. He nods, yes, yes, of course.
“Well, I hope it was a nice lamb, all plump and clean, not one of those stringy things with spindly legs and cloudy eyes.”
“I’m sure it was a fine lamb,” he says, regretting it right away.
