B.J. Buckley

Even before increasing impacts of climate change on weather patterns, in the huge portion of the Rocky Mountain West I have called home since childhood — Wyoming and Montana — most discussions of what season it actually is are often equal parts humor and desperation. Their boundaries, if such exist, have always been notoriously capricious. Wyoming newspaper writer Bill Sniffin contends our four seasons are actually "Almost Winter, Winter, Still Winter, and Construction", the latter often congruent with "Mud Up to Your Ass", "Annual 4th of July Hail Storm", and "August Hurricane Force Wind Event".

In the ranch country east of Sheridan, Wyoming, where I spent nearly two decades of my young adulthood, the adage learned by heart about spring was Fool’s Spring, Second Winter, False Spring, Third Winter, Mud Season, Winter’s Revenge, Actual Spring ... and that final designation was always iffy. It pays to be vigilant: Fool’s and False Springs could kill you. Actual Spring could break your heart. It's a painful irony that the poems PHQ was so kind to accept are about a kind of spring that perhaps will never come again in my lifetime: a spring containing the promises of greening, and water.

The vast, grain-raising north central portion of Montana, where I live now, is entering its 6th year of severe drought. A summer of record high winds, no rain, and temperatures consistently in the 90s was followed by an equally desiccated autumn. Aside from one weeklong interval of weather in the minus 'teens, daytime temperatures in the 40s to 60s persisted throughout October, November, January, February. It has snowed on the peaks of the Rocky Mountain Front, which I can see from my yard 70 miles away, and that pack remains rated at low normal levels. But aside from a few brief intense blizzards which dropped less than 3 inches each of the white stuff, snow has been absent between 4,000 and 6,000 feet — that thin band of altitude where the majority of humans and animals, wild and domestic, live, work, recreate, raise crops, reproduce. Its snowpack is currently rated at less than 10% of normal. Farmers in my irrigation district received only half their allotment of water in summer 2024, and the ditches went dry in early August rather than early October, because the mountain reservoirs that hold the previous winter’s snowmelt were empty. Last year, summer of 2025, they only received half of that already diminished amount.

The colors of this year’s burgeoning spring are the soft muted colors of dust and ash. The ground never froze. Our yard is bare dirt. Seven months unwatered, the old leaves of the heirloom irises stayed green; new ones are breaking through the soil, as are the leaves of red and yellow tulips planted by some previous owner of this place. Peonies are sending up deep red new shoots at their centers. The buds of the lilacs broke their shells in early February. If winter skips its revenge this year, just maybe they still will bloom.