This is the year that I have had to admit quite openly that I no longer enjoy winter—if I ever did in the first place. In fact, you might say that I have come to hate winter. The weather for the past week has not been extreme—most days had stretches that were barely freezing, with at least an hour or two that got to forty degrees Fahrenheit. The precipitation, which was never very copious, was also mainly nocturnal, leaving a thin patina of morning ice or snow that melted slowly and messily by midafternoon. On one day, Saturday, I was even able to take a passable walk in a longish dry spell. But the sun made only the briefest of cameo appearances during several days, and when it did appear seemed tentative and reluctant.
The audience of this blog is mostly domestic, but I do enjoy a small international readership, mainly though not exclusively in England. On a couple of occasions I have received private communications from this sector complaining that this or that thing I have said is of such exclusively parochial American interest or expression as to be opaque to them. Since I myself have had to learn to cope with Brits talking about “Boxing Day” and other such mysteries—it turns out to have nothing whatsoever to do with pugilism—I shall try to be sensitive concerning the very American parochialism of Groundhog Day, the second of February. But of course explaining Groundhog Day supposes that one knows what a groundhog is. That is an unsafe assumption. A groundhog is an unappealing rodent animal closely akin to if not identical with the animal more widely known in England as a woodchuck. Both of these names—ground hog and woodchuck, especially the latter—are a little strange. The strange element is the chuck part. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology has four disparate listings for this word, and two more for the possibly related chuckle. None of them seems connected to the idea of tossing or throwing, incidentally. The sense of the word in the classic tongue-twister beginning “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” is actually uncertain. No other use of the word chuck to denote an animal is known to me. However, a myth or social witticism developed among the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch—who of course were not of Netherlandish but of German (Deutsch) ancestry—to the effect that the weather on one particular day, February 2, was a sure harbinger of the comparative brevity or protraction of the winter weather still ahead. It all depended upon whether the groundhog (woodchuck), peeking his head out of his subterranean fastness on that day, could see his own shadow. Well, Groundhog Day passed unnoticed by me a week or ten days ago, and I don’t know whether or not the groundhog saw his shadow. In fact, I have trouble remembering whether it is good or bad news if he does see it. It is all rather “counter-indicative” as my students say. That is, a sunny day casting shadows presages more rather than less cold weather ahead. But I don’t need strange signs or portents. I can feel in my bones that winter is not receding any time soon.
There are some thousands of small towns scattered throughout the American heartland, many of which strive mightily to claim some element of distinctiveness if not uniqueness. I don’t know by what circumstance Punxsutawney, an otherwise obscure village in central Pennsylvania, became the national arbiter of the important matter of predicting the annual advent of spring, but it did. Punxsutawney is a small town just about three hundred miles due west from here. I have never been there, but I am very familiar with its type. There are literally thousands of such places in America, each with its own unique distinction—well advertised, usually by a large faded painted sign at either end of the Main Street: America’s Frog Capital, Home of the world’s largest living cave, Birthplace of pinochle champions, Life-Sized tableau of the Battle of Mud Flat, etc., etc. Some of these places have managed to claim a place in the national annals of world-class kitsch. One thinks of the giant peach water tower of Gaffney, S.C., or any one of Paul Bunyan’s several blue oxen bringing fame to hamlets on the Minnesota tundra. But with its meteorological groundhog, Punxsutawney really hit the jackpot. There was even a fairly amusing film featuring it a few years ago. Unfortunately, as diverting as all this can be, it does little to make more tolerable the unpleasantness of winter, which becomes more oppressive to me with advancing age. I must console myself with the true fact that in all of the years in the nearly nine decades of my lengthening experience spring has never failed to arrive (eventually), so that I have solid reasons for hoping for this year as well. But the wait threatens to be tedious.
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