Should we talk about the weather?

When we moved to Colorado from Wisconsin somewhat unexpectedly nearly three years ago, I turned to the literature of the West to help me understand just where it was we now called home. In the ensuing years I have read several Wallace Stegner novels, reread My Antonia and tried to delve into Katherine Ann Porter. Contemporary novels Augusta Locke by William Haywood Henderson and The Willow Field by William Kittredge, along with the wonderful Fort Collins journal Matter, have also helped me get my bearings.

One quote that resonated with this transplant in particular comes from Stegner, who bluntly informs us that when living in the West:

"You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time."

For the most part I agree with his assessment, it is a far different environment in Denver and Colorado than the upper-Midwest I grew up in. Unfortunately I have not gotten over the green, not yet, and I do not expect to any time soon. And so, with Denver in bloom it seemed natural that I would pull my rarely used copy of Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac to read up on Wisconsin in March.

Writing in the 1940s, Leopold's March entry is a love letter to geese. He opens by telling us:

"One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring."

Though Leopold's writing is like home cooking for me, I couldn't help but wonder how much the state's climate and environment has changed since he wrote those words, and since our awakening to the effects of global warming.

Oddly enough, my former hometown rag, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a story this weekend that answered my question. The Journal Sentinel reports that Leopold's daughter, Nina Leopold Bradley, has taken up her father's mantle in chronicling the natural events of her father's old stomping grounds. The article reports:

But spring's advance has been so dramatic that if Leopold were alive today, he'd have to rewrite parts of his seminal book, "A Sand County Almanac."

Take, for example, the Canada geese. Leopold wrote that they "tumbled out of the sky like maple leaves" in March.

But records by his daughter show that migratory geese are returning home more than a month sooner - now arriving about Feb. 19.

The article can be read in its entirety here.

Obviously this is a grim prognosis. I am not comfortable preaching about the consequences of global warming - I need to get my own house in order - but I can say that when you encounter its effects in an individually familiar setting, the reality becomes all the more stark.

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Whatever the future holds, today we witnessed a beautiful spring day in Denver. The view from here: