Figure 1 – Nor’easter March 8, 2018. (c) DE Wolf 2018

Well, it is March and we have had our second nor’easter along the East Coast. My office is closed. The Town has asked me to stay off the road. I went downstairs to get coffee and snapped this photograph of my birdfeeder. March storms tend to come with this dangerous coating of the tree limbs.

Why do we call it a nor’easter, instead of a northeaster? Is it a reversion of some kind to a seafaring past, genes that most of us don’t have? It is a strange point of being a New Englander that this kind of wild weather soaks our brains and we are driven to affect a nautical tongue. “At matie! dars a mightie rough wind outa the nord. Lower ye missan mast! Batten down the hatches. Ay!” 

This weekend will come the time change.

“We loiter in winter while it is already spring.”

Henry David Thoreau