March weather madness
A high school student enjoys ice an cream cone in Johnstown, Pa., as snow falls on the first day of spring on Tuesday. Credit: AP / Todd Berkey
Here we go again. Long Island hasn’t been able to make it through a week lately without a storm pounding us. And now, right on cue, another nor’easter is bearing down on the region. It’s the fourth this month, our own meteorological March Madness.
The poet T.S. Eliot had it wrong. April is not the cruelest month. It’s March. It promises the arrival of spring, which supposedly started Tuesday, but it gives us the grim reality of an endless cycle of cold, gray misery.
It’s not only the canceled trains and the messy roads and the downed trees and the power outages and the school closings and the postponed meetings, though those are exasperating problems. It’s also the feeling that this is never going to end, that we’re stuck in an endless feedback loop where one bad-weather system breeds another and the shovels and snowblowers are never going to get put away and the lettuce and pea seeds are never going to get planted and the polar bear plunges will never be passe.
The high temperature at Long Island MacArthur Airport on the so-called first day of spring was 37 degrees. On Dec. 21, the first day of winter, it was 39.
What’s that you say? You see crocuses pushing through the hard soil? Must be a mirage. Wait, opening day is only eight days away? Ahh, time enough for the eternal cycle to renew. Snowout.— The editorial board
