Riding the Wave, 35. The Changing Weather.

Today is a grey and misty day, as we wait for a cold front to come barreling in this afternoon and evening, leaving much water and high winds. It's a normal December day for Galicia. This weather is forecast to continue well into next week, so I doubt we will be able to see the "Christmas star" on Monday, when Jupiter and Saturn align for the first time in the night sky in 800 years. Well, at least I got to see the comet this summer. 

All in all, this has been one of the warmest years, again. While we didn't have many days with extremely high temperatures, at least not here, on the coast, the colder months weren't as cold as they should have been. This fall has been quite warm, except for a couple of days at the beginning of December. How warm? Well, one of my oldest apple trees has its buds beginning to swell. That's after it already gave us blossoms in September.

With every passing year, the change in climate becomes more noticeable. My husband says that during his childhood, the local hills were covered in snow every few days in January, and that most mornings there was frost. Now, it's a major event when it snows nearby, and frost of the kind you have to scrape off your car windshield is not a daily event, not in January nor any other winter month. The storms keep blowing in off the Atlantic, like today, but they don't bring such cold weather as often behind them.

What they are, is more potent. While wind gusts of fifty kilometers per hour is pretty standard, we are getting stronger and stronger storms. A storm with gusts of over a hundred kilometers per hour used to happen once or twice a winter. Now, it's more than twice a month, depending on the year. Memorable storms, such as Hortensia in the 1980's are now a more common occurence. Klaus over ten years ago ushered in a period of named storms that have done quite a bit of damage. 

The last time we saw snowflakes fall at home was close to twenty years ago. Since then, the hills have received snow, and we've driven the twenty minutes or so to see the beauty, but that's it. I still remember close to thirty years ago, a winter or two after we moved here. It was a weekend night, and I had gone out with friends. Driving home, I noticed the rain acting strangely in the headlights. I realized it was snow. When I got home, in the early morning hours, some had coalesced on our stone fence. I took some, went in, and woke up my mother by placing it in her hand. I was so excited! She wasn't as excited. "And that's why you woke me up?" 

She had never liked snow in Boston. I remember her always in skirts in my earliest years, wearing dark tights with knee high boots, unwilling to give in to the New England winter. When I was around seven or eight, she gave in and bought polyester slacks for the winter, with the tights still underneath, and tucked into the boots. She hated the snow and the ice. She had fallen more than once, and that was enough for her. Once she and my father had retired here to Spain, she was more than happy not to ever see snow again. 

I loved it, and was always happy to see snowfall predictions for Boston that exceeded three inches, though it always seemed to fall in the western and northern suburbs. Snow days were beautiful days I got to play with the white magic, until my mother decided I had been in the cold long enough and called me in.

Now, with each passing year, the possibility of looking out the window on a cold winter's day, and seeing snowflakes drifting out of a white sky, is becoming less and less. Even when summers are not broiling, the winters are getting warmer. Larger storms are appearing on our Atlantic doorstep, but they only bring wind and heavy rain. Climate change is here to stay, and I'm not happy about it.

Life continues.