The Manic Gardener

I keep planning to write a post about yard work, of which there has been plenty, but the weather conspires against me. It’ll warm up nicely, I’ll take a deep breath and relax; well, winter’s over at last, I’ll be able to get out into the garden soon… And two days later, wham, six to twelve inches of snow. Even when the temperatures rise, it takes days for all that to melt.

(One area in northern Montana got four feet of snow sometime in May. It’s not city gardeners who are really suffering; it’s ranchers, who have been losing sheep and cattle by the hundreds. Early spring is lambing and calving time, not a good time for blizzards.)

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Here’s the scenario: You’ve been hearing the sound of raindrops on the roof for hours, when it suddenly stops.

Here’s the question: How should you interpret this phenomenon?

Here are the options: It’s possible (taking a broad view) that you have just been transported to Mars, where it doesn’t rain. It’s also possible, if unlikely, that you have gone suddenly deaf.

Leaving aside these somewhat farfetched possibilities, you might conclude that it has stopped raining. Seeing as how it’s June in the Northern Hemisphere, this would be the most obvious conclusion—and the correct one, except that there’s a hidden assumption underlying that statement: “It’s stopped raining” generally implies “It’s stopped precipitating.” And while the former statement is currently true, the latter is false.

In other words, my good friends, it has started snowing.

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