Spring is just around the corner! This is my 4th spring here in the United States, but yet again it surprises me the way trees just spring back to life with a little sunshine…..trees that have become dead because of the freezing winters, trees that have lost all signs of life and shades of green because of the bone chilling temperatures. The fresh and translucent color of green that starts budding all around you is so pleasant to look at, the way brown just vanishes and different shades of green just take all the place is so amazing. 
Actually, we get the first look of any arriving season at the departmental stores and especially the arts and crafts stores (Michaels is my favourite). The stores change their colors and displays in just a day and spread the mood of the oncoming seasons. Come spring, you will find a lot of tulips and bright daisies beautifully decorated in bouquets and come fall, you will see the same bouquets transform into warm and cozy colors like the oranges and the maroons of the maple leaves. And just another month from the fall, everything is decorated in deep red and silvery snowflakes welcoming the winter and the holiday season.
Every season gets a different mood along with it. While spring feels so peppy and vibrant, autumn marks the beginning of the festive season and the lovely feeling of spending your time with family and friends and winter is kind of a mix of gloomy and dreamy feeling. Sometime it looks so beautiful like a winter wonderland in a fairy tale that we have heard of as kids and only feel fortunate to be experiencing one, and sometimes it feels so gloomy and makes us long for bright mornings of the spring.
Being raised in a tropical weather, I was fortunate enough to have pleasant spring weather for most of the year. Well, a duh! that I was, I never really appreciated having such beautiful weather until I started experiencing it only for some time of the year. There is one thing for sure that I like about the widely varied seasons here (USA), we get a chance to shop quite often (give season as a reason you see!). From where I come, winter is like mid fall here. And now after experiencing winters with 10 inches of snow, that doesn’t even measure up to winter for me! I did get my first taste of cold winter during my stay in Gurgaon, part of North India. Well, it dint snow there, but there was lot of fog and mist. I really enjoyed that. But on the down side, Gurgaon also had very and dry summers. Thanks to the climatic changes, summers in India are getting hotter, and it feels like there are only 2 seasons – summer and severe summer!!! It wasn’t this bad when I was younger. I do remember having moderate summers and chilly winters, but it’s no longer the same. Monsoons are no longer the same; they show up for only a short period of time. What’s happening to the climate?
Decreasing level of water in River ColoradoI know I started this post on a very happy note, but as I went on, I started feeling bad for what we are doing to these wonderful creations of Mother Nature. Are we doing enough to save the climate from even more damage? Actually all these thoughts crept into my mind when I was reading about how longer a particular material takes to decompose. When I read that thermo coal takes a million years to decompose, I was shocked! I was shocked not at the “million”, but at the number of thermo coal cups that we dispose everyday. I am no saint, I dispose at least 2. That really struck me hard. Hard enough that I decided to bring my own pet bottle (for water) and my own spoon and fork (for lunch). Well, it’s not much, but at least I will do whatever I can. It’s not just thermo coal, there are so many other things that we dispose and don’t even think twice before doing that – plastic bags, rubber, aluminum cans, diapers, woolen materials, Styrofoam and a whole lot of other things !
Landfills
(http://www.discoveret.org/ksb/Facts.htm). I agree that some of them are recyclable, but still what proportion of are we able to recycle? Like for example, we keep shouting slogans that trees should not be cut, that will lead to soil erosion etc, but we still do cut them and make a lot of things out of the tree barks. One major product is paper, but what percentage of the paper products that we are disposing are being recycled? Are we still not going after trees and cutting them down? Yes, a lot of these questions are circling my brain right now, and I am sorry I am injecting everyone else’s mind who is reading my blog too! One particular question that keeps lingering in my mind is “Do we want our children to have an Earth with no nature and no beautiful seasons to enjoy?”
2 comments:
Hmm... Interesting transition from the romanticisation of seasons to enviornmental concerns. Reading this post almost felt like listening to your mind thinking aloud.
I agree with you, we never appreciated our tropical climate enough when we had it. The phrase " its a beautiful sunny day" took on a whole new meaning after my first snowstorm ;)
i completely understand what you are saying about the environment! it is so sad - within the last 50 years, we have irrevocably changed the face of this earth, after millions of years of it's existence. it absolutely astounds me.
i'm like you - we try to do what we can: using re-suable shopping bags, recycling everything we can, etc. it isn't much, like you said, but it's something. and it's not hard. i think if *everyone* did just a little bit more, just the simple things, we could really help out the environment a lot!
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