Lea’s snowy driveway
In this post, Lea confronts a snowless winter, and what it means to finally see Climate Change after years of only hearing about the transformations to come.
A family photo album triggered the awakening. I was flipping through the pictures, looking at all of the photographs in their semi-orderly position. The photos ranged from my family members to stills of my backyard, cataloging my parents’ development of the fixer upper they took on. After pondering a picture of my older brother before his first day of Kindergarten, I turned the page to see something I have yet to see in my lifetime. A whole two pages in the family photo album are dedicated to snow piled up almost as high as the porch windows, over four feet tall. What struck me was not the backward time jump, from September 1999 to December 1992. However, it dawned on me at that moment that I had never witnessed snow like that in my life. The time in which I was reminiscing on my family’s photos was Christmas 2016 when I was home from my first semester of college. That December, the grass stared back at me, yellowed and exposed to the mild temperature of 36 degrees. Looking out the window, there was nothing more obvious to me than the fact that the times had changed. The climate had changed.
To: Lea
From: Global Warming
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Needless to say, it was not a merry Christmas, nor a happy New Year.
Every second that it did not snow was a second of hopelessness. I had never wanted it to snow more in my life. When my grandparents arrived, I ground my teeth at my family’s gladness that the roads were clean, with no snow out to get them. They didn’t want it to get any colder than it already was. I wanted to snap, “It’s hardly cold out. Just look at the photo album!” I resisted the urge to tell them that if they didn’t like snow, then they should move to someplace where it’s not expected. In New England, no snow is unacceptable in winter. By the time we got to presents, I didn’t care anymore. I thought, Why do I want something that I do not need? I need the Earth in order to live. I need air in order to breathe. I need it to snow. I needed snow to let me know that everything was going to be okay, even if that was not true. No, even though that was not true. At least with snow, I could temporarily pretend that climate change is not real, at least for one day. Every day after Christmas that it did not snow, it was hard for me to not see what I had seen in my family’s photo album. The ghost of a snow fall that will never again be. When it eventually snowed, sometime in January of the next year, we didn’t even get a foot, hardly an inch. A dusting. A warning for some, the awakened. However, an annoyance to those who had yet to awaken to climate change.