March came in like a pretty toothless lion

It's no doubt hard for you young people to imagine, but there was a time when eight or ten inches of snow would nearly paralyze this area. For one thing there were a lot fewer plows, and the back roads took much longer to be cleared. For another thing very few people had mechanical aids like snow blowers and such so sidewalks and drives took much longer to be cleared. For yet a third thing, there were a lot fewer working people who enjoyed the option of simply staying home and working more or less remote. And finally, if you've never driven a rear wheel drive car in snow you can have no idea how badly they performed relative to today's nearly ubiquitous front wheel drive cars.

Yesterday I plowed our driveway and found the roads nearly dry by mid afternoon. A similar snow twenty or thirty years ago would have snarled things up for days, not least because rear wheel drive cars would have been stuck half in and half out of every roadside ditch. The good old days were very often a real pain in the ass, and never moreso than when one would face the prospect of driving after a snow like we had yesterday.

Meanwhile, where's the global warming? Last year we had our first crocuses blooming outside the front door (it's a warm microclimate) by the end of February. This year the crocuses next to the front door were barely starting to poke their green stems above the surface before the snow covered them on March 2nd.