When winter finally released its icy grip last week, with temperatures reaching above freezing for the first time in weeks, we had figured the worst of this winter season was behind us.
Needless to say, that was wishful thinking.
As native New Englanders, by no means were we so naive as to believe that Mother Nature would fail to have a few surprises remaining for us.
When March 1 starts to roll along on the calendar, we always are reminded of the proverb we first learned as young children at Our Lady of Grace parochial school in Everett: “March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb.”
So we were well-aware that nasty weather still lay ahead. We were braced for a lion, but we weren’t expecting a prehistoric beast.
So we were both incredulous and exasperated as we listened to the weatherman’s increasingly-dire predictions for a major weather event headed our way as this weekend approached
We’ve all become familiar with the relatively-recent meteorological term of “bombogenesis” to describe the rapid intensification of a storm system that seems to take on a life of its own.
But we did not anticipate the fury of this week’s blizzard that had such a wide impact and that caused so much misery for so many of us.
We well remember the Blizzard of ‘78, the No Name Storm of 1991 (also known as The Perfect Storm), and the Snowmageddon Winter of 2015.
We took all of those major weather events in stride. As impactful as they were, they were simply annoyances for us at the time. But we were younger then, and youth has a way of brushing aside even the harshest of circumstances — a four-foot drift looks like a playground instead of a back injury waiting to happen.
Despite the frigid temperatures, we still ran outside almost every day throughout this winter, even in the face of daily, single-digit wind chills. We were determined not to let Ol’ Man Winter get the better of us.
But truth be told, this winter season of 2026 has pushed us over the edge. The “lion” finally bit us — and Florida suddenly seems very appealing.
