Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 12, 1992 TAG: 9201120080
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
ROANOKE'S WINTER NAME IS `MUD'
Next garage sale, the sleds go.For the right price, I'll throw in ice skates, too. Gloves. Perhaps, if you catch me in a bad enough mood, I'll throw in a pair of boots with low miles.
Halfway through my third "winter" in the Roanoke Valley, I'm convinced that this place has different seasons from what I'm accustomed.
There are three seasons here: Summer, leaf-drop, and mud.
Summer lasts nine months. Leaf-drop is about two weeks. The rest is mud.
I did not expect this trend when I did my exhaustive research on Roanoke's climate before moving here. I looked at the colorful U.S. map on the back of a pack of sweet pea seeds. I've long since planted the seeds, eaten the peas, and thrown away the packet, but I distinctly remember the map showed a long prong of purple jutting south from where I lived into this part of Virginia.
It was not true. The sweet pea map is a lie.
Though climatologists swear that the weather in Virginia has shown a historic trend toward getting colder, the past three muds have been disconcertingly warm.
The mud of '89-'90 brought a smattering of snow and the sled came in handy for 29 hours. Last mud brought a glaze of ice in late December, no thicker than the shiny layer on a holiday ham.
These are the muds of our discontent.
This mud is the same as last. December, on average, was 4 degrees warmer than your basic December. Jan. 1 was colder than normal, but every day of this month since then has been warmer than usual.
I can show you forsythia plants in bloom already. I can show you the crowns of tulips jabbing through the mud. I can sell you a sled.
But the problem is not so much that we wallow in a Mud Wonderland. It is the way that mud's intrusion into our calendars and our lives cheats us.
It cheats us, yes, out of simple pleasures like crackling fires, hot chocolate, frostbite, snowmen, and nine-car pileups on the highway due to icy road conditions.
Quit being so American, so hell-bent on immediate gratification. Think down the road, about your future. Think about April.
Spring fever - true spring fever - is a psychological release. It's the smell of the warm air on cold ground. It's the first tender shoots of grass, of the first ruby-throated nuthatch returned from the tropics to break its tiny backbone by flying into the window over your kitchen sink.
It's an energizing release from the grit and gloom of winter, a sensual rebirth of spirit straight from the loins of Person Earth him/herself.
To deny that physio-psycho-bio gratification - and mud does that by pre-empting what once was spring - is to rip asunder the very essence of the human spirit and to deny us box seats to one of nature's most awesome annual shows.
It bodes the demise of this species, mark my word.
I ran this apocalyptic interpretation of mud and the evaporation of the spring fever phenomenon past Paul Woods, a Hollins College psychology professor.
He stopped short - just short - of calling me a crackpot.
I may still sell my sleds.
Keywords:
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