The First Frost of 2094

One hundred years ago, did we know

The frosts were an endangered species?

Well, we were just kids.

But

Yeah

I suppose we did know…

BUT

The change was so gradual

So comfortable

That we didn’t panic

Yet, we knew

Of course we did— meteorologists had been collecting the numbers

And Bill Nye explained the math

Even Captain Planet offered a few words

BUT

Spider-Man was on the TV too…

He was too busy being AMAZING to care about our carbon

Back in the real world the snow continued to fall and to stick

And we knew the way things were and

We

Knew

The way things would always be

So in times of peace we gathered the snow and built castles and cities that would never melt

And in times of war

We piled the fluff into great mounds and packed them down and

Carved and delved

Frozen tunnels, stockpiled with cold munitions

Serious armories hidden deep inside our mountains

And Al Gore said something

He sounded worried

He sounded urgent

BUT

That was for the grownups so we didn’t care

And then the electoral college screwed him (us) over

And we didn’t know this

So how could we notice?

We went back to our wars

Then one morning we grew up and heard it all again,

This time from Greta Thunberg.

…

BUT

She was just a kid, and we were big

We didn’t like being told what to do

Not by a girl

And that was another Inconvenient Truth

The biggest, fragilest men, they tried to bully her

It was silly

And absurd

How we all clung to our comforts

Some of us clung so hard our fingernails tore

But that was okay

It distracted us from the fact that we’d denied science

Bill Nye wept

Our leaders spat in his face and the Oil Barons told us to cheer

And half the country did

The rest, we tried to gather some snow for our own kids

BUT

It wouldn’t stick

The castles we managed to scrape together weren’t castles at all

We built anyway: snow huts and mud hovels

Wet and soft and grey—

At dawn, they’d be puddles

The gleaming battlements and secret, glittering tunnels were only memories

And we began to really know

But our kids thought, same as we used to think:

The new normal would never fade

BUT NOW

When the first frost comes mid January,

Our kids frown and

Fear and

Worry

Same as us

And our youngest grandkids still get excited

They look out their windows and say the frost looks pretty

BUT

We remember a time when deep snows came in November

And stuck around till April

We remember the castles and the wars and the peace,

The hovels and the puddles

And the warnings

So we wonder, in our old age,

If this first frost of 2094

Might be the last

And

If there even is a frost next year, will we be alive to see it?