I stood at the kitchen window sipping my morning tea and watching a few chickadees busy feeding at the birdfeeder. Blue jays perching in the white birch took turns stripping a seed cake. The little snow we had earlier in the winter, had completely disappeared during a long stretch of refrigerator winter weather. The snowless late February yard alongside the house looked dreary and comfortless like a hard, lumpy bed with neither the luxury of a pillow nor a blanket.

Thinking back over several decades of my life, I wondered, “Have we ever had a winter with so little snow and such warm temperatures?” Some winters had less snow when I was growing up, but not because the snow kept melting away in unnaturally warm December, January, and February weather.

Most families don’t avidly discuss the weather, but mine did, just as I suspect many farm families do. Unusual droughts, heat waves and unexpected freezes are the reasons many farm businesses have fallen into ruin. Delving deep into my memories, I tried to remember some of the things Mom and Daddy had said about unusual weather.

I recall Daddy saying, “There was one year without a summer. A huge volcano in Indonesia blew up and put so much ash and debris into the atmosphere that the entire northern hemisphere had dark, stormy weather, and frequent freezes all summer the following year. Because of it, crops failed, farmers went bankrupt, and many people starved.” The way Daddy spoke of that disaster, it seemed as if it had happened during his own father’s lifetime.

Putting down my cup of tea, I sat at my computer to Google, “the year without summer.” The first thing that showed up on the screen was, “In 1815, the volcano, Mount Tambora in Indonesia, exploded. It was the largest volcanic explosion recorded in history. It put so much ash and aerosol into the atmosphere that it blocked enough sunlight to change the weather. The following summer was dark and stormy; crops froze in June, July, and August.”

I looked at the date of the volcanic explosion: 1815. There was no way Daddy’s father would remember something from 1815. He and my grandmother were born in the 1860’s. Mount Tambora didn’t sound right, either. I thought Daddy had said it was Mount Krakatoa in Indonesia that blew up.

I did more research and found that a large volcano on the island of Krakatoa blew up in 1883. The Mount Tambora explosion strength was rated as 7; the Krakatoa explosion strength came in as a 6.  Thirty-six thousand people were killed by the latter. People 2,800 miles away in Australia heard the explosion. Scientists compared it to 200 megatons of TNT going off. This was significantly stronger than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.

Like the Tambora explosion, Krakatoa affected the northern hemisphere weather in the immediately following years. It is interesting that my grandparents emigrated to America from Germany during the early years after that volcanic explosion.

Leaning back in the chair and staring out the window at my snowless backyard, I mused, “What does this strange winter weather mean? Some people think the end of the world is coming. That might be, but then again, it might not be. We’ve had strange weather before. Daddy once told me there was such a severe drought during the Great Depression, he plowed his swampland and planted a crop there. That is something he never did before, and never had to do again.”

My takeaway from my morning meditations on the strange winter we’ve had this year is that the weather is what it is. If it gets to the point where we need to plow the swamp, then that’s what we’ll have to do.