Today, while I was stuck inside working and writing blog posts during all of my breaks, the snow melted. It hit the mid-50s and would have been an excellent day for a walk if a few inches of snow hadn’t melted and turned the entire world into a swampy morass of goop, mud, and salty grit. You see, until just a couple weeks ago (two, as of this being posted), we hadn’t gotten much snow. There’d been several incredibly light dustings and maybe an inch or two total of accumulation over a couple snow events, but none of it stuck around long and it was never enough to really blanket the environment. Two weeks ago, we had a couple snowstorm events over a few days and accumulated a proper amount of snow, enough for it to ACTUALLY feel like a proper Wisconsin Winter. Now, today, it’s all melting and will likely completely vanish over the next few days as the temperatures rise above freezing and stay there. Sure, it’ll drop down eventually and we’ll get that Wisconsin Classic, the good old Wintery Mix of snow, rain, and sleet that turns the world to slush, but this is probably going to be it for actual snow accumulation barring some strange late-March temperature drops. A week and a half of snow. Maybe three or four weeks of decently cold temperatures, most of it without much snow. And then a bunch of days in the fifties, tons in the fourties, and who know how many High Temperature Records. What a terrible excuse for a winter.

The first few months of the year are always a weird time. As we move out of the winter holidays where little work gets done and lots of not working happens, January and February can feel like a real slog as we go from New Years Day until whenever Easter happens without much in the way of holidays (unless you’re lucky enough to get bank or federal holidays at your employer, anyway). Even if you do have some days off work, there really isn’t much going on save the bright pink point that is Valentines day. Which means that, at least in most of Wisconsin, the only color we get in this season other than the washed-out hues of a dead or sleeping wintery world is the brilliant white glow of snow. It is the sole break in the cold, dreary grey that overtakes not only the sky but the whole world beneath it and it was an important break in the monotony for me, at the very least, and many of my coworkers besides. Without the changing snow to mark to the passage of time, the days and weeks stretch into a dull blur that makes it impossible to feel time move forward, a problem already inflicted on this year by the sheer stress and constant events of the current government as it attempts to dismantle every instution the US public has come to rely on. This year has felt truly endless.

Though I can now mark the passage of time by the shifting glow of the snow and the gradual revelation of the pavement and asphalt beneath the packed-snow on the roads, it will not be long before that is gone again and all I’m left to watch is puddles dry up, freeze over, and occasionally grow again as freezing rain replenishes the dwindling snow melt. Full winter lasted only two weeks and already we’re moving into the first days of spring a month ahead of schedule. I’m glad I had the chance to go for walks, to stick my bare feet in the snow on my balcony, and to feel the cold wind bite into my face as I walked through flurries of heavy snowflakes, but I feel like I had to cram it all into the two snowfalls we got rather than be able to actually enjoy myself. It was a hurried affair, trying to make every minute count as the snowstorms raged and still managed to under-deliver on every forecast, and I feel genuinely sad that I probably won’t get a chance to do that again until next year. If I’m lucky. If it’s not a repeat of this winter or something even worse as climate change inevitably accelerates in the face of cloud computing for shitty theft-based algorithms and the reactionary politics of the far-right. This could just be what winters will be like in the future.

I will admit that I’m feeling maudeline because today was a gray, cloudy day full of snowmelt and slush after a rough night of far too little sleep. I’ll also admit that I’m having a difficult time not thinking about things that stress me out due to the combination of negativity and tiredness. I have no idea what the future will hold, how winters will actually change, or what even the next few weeks will hold. All attempts to predict the future inevitably run aground on the nonsensical present and even the science of weather reporting suffers a similar fate as the government programs and departments it was so reliant on are stripped for meager savings in the name of an extractive capitalist by a billionaire without a soul or shred of decent humanity. It is difficult to see one and not think of the other one. It is difficult to not see the changing environment as a herald of things to come, both metaphorically and literally. It is difficult to accept that event the most iron-clad predictors are no longe reliable or that the things that once felt immutable might actually just be dwindling inertia. Yet here we are, winter lasted two weeks, my government is trying to destroy itself, and all I can do is try to find a new way to live amidst the mess.