mostly melted

I miss snow. 

I tell my students, when I was their age, snow would get as deep as your knee and school could be out an entire week. All they know are the crop dustings we’ve been having. 

We get less snow every year. 

I remember building forts out of the towers that the city snow plows would put at the end of my street’s dead end. Back then... when I was a kid, you could buy orange trash bags with jack-‘o-lantern faces, but now leaves don’t fall by October (and nevermore in September). They stopped selling those, at least in this area.

Probably for the best. I’ve seen people burn leaves through January. 

The West Coast and Australia burn uncontrollably during summers, nowadays. We’re so desensitized that seeing a half-charred koala wrapped in a blanket, hauled away by vets is perfectly acceptable. I remember when a hurricane front passed over Belleville. I sat in bed, reading a book, waiting it out. 

Leave your car running in the garage, and the fumes can kill you. Highway vehicles release about 1.7 billion tons of that toxic contaminant into the air each year. 

I think the human brain can’t process numbers in the billions (I definitely cannot). But 1.7 billion is a lot-alot. Saturn is 886 million miles from the sun (average). 886 x 2 = 1772. So, if 1 mile = 1 TON of toxic fumes, then our toxicity level is about to Saturn and back... each year. What are the repercussions? Well, let’s ask our friend, Common Sense: 

He comes often recommended, and common sense is great for common problems. Fight or flight? Should I wear a coat when it’s snowing? Should I take a shortcut or the busy street? 

For complex problems—problems that aren’t understandable by just the 5 senses, you may consider shopping around for complex sense. 

You can’t look out your window and see how drinking sodas sold in plastic bottles have increased the amount of diseases in the world. Say, that particular plastic bottle is covering the bog, killing the duckweed, which starves the tadpoles, so decreases the frogs, which increases the mosquitos, which increases the spread of disease. 

Our brains barely process numbers in the billion, so why should the same common sense I use to pick out which flavor jelly to put on my toast be used to process what effect 2 Sun-to-Saturns worth of car emissions will have on the population of koalas? 

I guess, all this to say, I miss snow. 

It snowed a little today, mostly melted after a few hours. I’ve only had to scrape my car windows like 3 times this entire winter so far.