Times A-Changin'

I've been thinking about a post I wrote in January called Remembering Winter. In this post, I lamented winters lost in the gradual heating of the planet, and I truly missed the changing of the seasons, the snow of winter, a warm fireplace, a day spent ice skating and sipping hot chocolate (with a shot of spearmint schnapps). As it turns out, winter was not lost after all, it was merely delayed. In January, I watched my daffodils spring up from the ground, and at the end of February, (when my crocuses usually bloom) we had our first snowfall. And while I'm pretty sure that flowers don't consult a calendar when getting ready to bloom, my garden has been oddly out of sync. My camellia bushes had bloomed in December for the first 3 years I had them, and for the past 2 years, they haven't bloomed at all. This year, I had the over-eager daffodils sprouting up in January, but not one of them bloomed. My crocuses made a surprise appearance a few weeks ago, in late March, more than 3 weeks later than the past several years. I've done all of my spring gardening, I cut back my butterfly bush, I planted some new rose bushes, and then on Saturday, it snowed. I was driving to work as cherry blossoms and snow flakes fell. If I still lived in Chicago, I would not be surprised at snow in spring, but I live in Washington now, where it's unheard of. To tell you the truth, I'm a crappy gardener, and the reasons that my plants don't bloom could be entirely my fault, but I just don't think so.

It's as if time moves on in the steady rhythm that we have grown accustomed to, but the Earth has slowed it's rotation ever so slightly.
You can feel it in your gut, that the planet is changing, you don't even need scientists to confirm our worst fears. We instinctively sense that something is wrong.

I was watching a re-run of the West Wing. My partner and I do it often when we feel that political reality is too harsh for everyday life, and we seek the comfort of fiction. It was the episode about Bartlett's re-election. He was standing on stage at a fictional campaign headquarters, and giving a victory speech. The victory song playing as the fictional President gave the thumbs up and the balloons fell, was an old protest song, probably the greatest protest song ever written, way back when I was ten years old. But I still remember the words, they are even more relevant today than they were back then, the words seem to me today, almost prescient.

Come gather round people where ever you roam,
and admit that the waters around you have grown,
and accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone,
if your time to you is worth saving,
then you'd better start swimming
or you'll sink like a stone,
for the times they are a-changin.

The waters around you have grown, guys. Start swimming.

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