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Spring is running 20 days early.
It’s exactly what we expect, but it’s not good.
—The Washington Post, February 27, 2018
Please deliver us from this winter of discontent, with its frigid
squint and brimstone breath. Don’t blame February, there is no
cruelest month, only this year’s hateful season with its germ
swarms and ineffective flu shot, its too-big coat and small, grabby
hands. We did not vote for these mad swings of frost and thaw,
this bomb-cyclone of caprice. Enough with the floods and plagues
and frozen buds, the constant sneers and taunts—If you don’t like
18 degrees, how about 45? Too muddy? OK, it’s 12. Loser.
We’re so tired—more tired than from the long cold blizzards
of our youth, more anxious than in those strange warm spells
that make us worry for the north. Reduced to wishing for
a singular ordeal: If it must be bitter, could the skies at least
be clear? If there must be an early melt, could we save the rain
for later? We believe we could accept some simple difficulty—
summer’s scorch, early fall—but won’t agree which hardships
we can weather. We’d promise to repent, but who are we
kidding? Don’t let it get worse. Better yet, just make it spring.
Kathryn Almy is a Michigan writer whose work has appeared in various print and on-line publications, including The 3288 Review, City of the Big Shoulders: A Chicago Poetry Anthology, and Great Lakes Review's narrative map, and is forthcoming from The Offbeat and Star 82 Review.