Although the calendar told us that spring officially arrived last Thursday, Mother Nature, as usual, has decided on her own time frame for when she will allow spring to be sprung.
As we are writing this editorial at the beginning of the week, the weatherman is telling us that temperatures will remain below freezing all day for the next two days and then a major coastal snowstorm will descend upon us mid-week, delivering up to a foot or more of snow, before conditions return to a more normal weather pattern by the end of the week.
None of this should be surprising. We’ve had an unusually cold winter, thanks to all of those polar vortexes that spun our way, and it will take a while before the Arctic loosens its icy grip on us. But even in general terms, those of us who live in coastal New England never have a spring to speak of. Coastal breezes, bringing in the air from  the 40-degree ocean water, keep us cool, even though temperatures may be 15 degrees higher just 10 miles inland.
The forecasts for Tuesday-into-Wednesday’s storm  remind us of the April Fool’s Blizzard of 1997, which dumped more than two feet of snow in this area in a 24 hour period, making it what at the time was one of the four largest snowstorms ever to hit Greater Boston.
So Mother Nature is up to her usual tricks. And as always, to paraphrase the well-known saying, the weather will be something we will all talk about, but none of us all be able to do anything about it.
