Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Spring

I will admit that the weather has been quite warm lately - in the 20's, even into the 30's occasionally. And I don't know if we've truly acclimated or if it's just relative, but I never thought the mid-20's would feel balmy. The other day B and I were walking up to school and commenting on how warm it felt. When we got to school we mentioned this to OFL, who said, "Yeah, it's 4 out, and no wind!" 4 degrees, people. There's something very wrong here.

Anyway, despite the warm weather, this past weekend has been our most wintry one yet. We had a major snowstorm on Friday, a real blizzard, which here means something different than in other places. When I was growing up in NH, a blizzard meant, basically, a ton of snow. Here, the term blizzard is less about the amount of snow and more about the combination of snow and wind, which on Friday night was truly impressive. The wind took the wind that was falling, along with the powder already on the ground, and whipped it around so furiously that from the BIA building I couldn't see the school at all.

Our village hosted a dance festival this weekend, and the bad weather kept a few of the other villages away on Friday - and one village that did come ended up with a few people lost on the tundra, which meant some search and rescue teams had to go out looking for them. Luckily they were found and returned safely that same night.

The snow and wind kept up, off and on, all weekend, though to a lesser degree of intensity. I'd say (and I'm really bad at estimating these type of things) that maybe another 12 inches of snow fell in all? But because of the wind, it's not distributed evenly - instead there are patches of grass that are bare, just feet away from snowdrifts that come up to my waist. It's a somewhat surreal landscape. On the south side door to the BIA building, the drifts must be 7 or 8 feet high. Up on the hills, though, the warm weather has started melting the snow away.

Even though we hardly got any snow this winter, what little we did get stuck around, since it never got warm enough to melt. Now that it's warm enough to melt what's here, apparently mother nature would like to make up for her lackluster winter efforts. Hopefully the warm temps will prevail and this snow won't last. I'm sick of winter. Especially because every time I hear anything from anyone in the lower 48, they're having beautiful spring weather.

Perhaps because of all the changes in the weather lately, or maybe just due to bad luck, I've got a nice little sinus infection going - runny, sore nose, nasal voice, pressure headache, all that lovely stuff. Another reason to hope that something resembling spring arrives soon.

1 comment:

  1. Remeber what I use to tell you Sara - Winter always fights with Spring because it doesn't want to leave - but take heart because you know that Spring always wins

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