Fairbanks is the angriest city in the USA. It's still snowing here. You should see the Facebook news feed from all my friends and acquaintences. We are mad. And as May 1st rolls around, we are madder than ever.
There won't be any Maypoles here. Instead, we are calling on all our friends with plow trucks to come over and clear our driveways. I am not making this up. Check this out.
That's my yard, except that it has snowed since then and there's more snow than ever. In fact, I'm going to go out tomorrow or the next day and make a snowman or two, since this is the heavy kind of snow. We usually get powder here, so it's one way of trying to make lemonade out of lemons. Snowmen out of snow. And then the dogs attack and destroy the snowmen with great glee. It's a zen thing.
Today it got up to 35° and the roads cleared and some even dried out. This morning it was a total goat rope with icy roads sending scores of vehicles into the ditch during the morning commute. Several hours after morning rush it was all clear, wet and driveable. I got home around 6:30 and the nightly snow began again. AGAIN.
According to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, our local paper, this is the third coldest winter on record. Not to mention that on certain days, the cold has broken ALL records. Yippee. Whoop tee doo.
As of tomorrow, this will be our third month of March. March is when you can expect the winter to start to get wobbly, and the temperatures to fluctuate, causing wacky weather. Sometimes the roads are dry, sometimes, wet, and sometimes a bunch of black ice stops everyone cold. But it's to be expected. It's March. Breakup can be messy, muddy and even icy. But we love it because it means winter is over!
Or not. We had March, and then we had an April that was March, and now, starting tomorrow, we are having May, which is yet again March.
The whole town of Fairbanks and the folks in North Pole are all screaming UNCLE!
When this all first started some kept of up that Alaskan litany, "Well, at least it isn't forty below!"
No one is saying that now.
Even seasoned Alaskans in the Interior are beginning to feel that this is the way it will be. Forever. Until next winter when it IS forty below.
It's like when my son was almost three weeks late being born. At one point I just began to feel that it was a lie, that everyone was wrong, that I was going to be pregnant forever, uncomfortable forever and that's just how it was.
That's how this winter feels. It's never going to end. It's just going to snow every night forever.
We should be able to put our houseplants outside, to start building our gardens. Fairbanksans plant their seeds in February and plan to plant outside near the middle to end of May. We have a short, but very intense growing season because we are gaining daylight at 7 minutes per day until we have close to 24 hours daylight by June 21. Plants love this.
Now people have these leggy seedlings that are way too big for their pots...and nowhere to plant them.
I've started scanning airline tickets and I'm sure other people have, too. I thought I'd go Outside at Christmas time to get away from the darkest part of winter. Little did I know that I'd want to get away from winter in May.
This is one grumpy, angry, irritated town. If I had Xanax, I'd take it.
