Vermont's Long Streak of Benign Weather: When Does The Other Shoe Drop?

A peaceful scene on one of our decks in St. Albans, Vermont
this morning. We've been mostly lucky with safe weather
in the Green Mountain State for a few years now. When
will the other shoe drop?

 My husband says I can be too negative sometimes.

He's absolutely right. 

Although I very often see the positive side of things, I just sometimes find the dark cloud in the silver lining.  I just can't help it, I guess. That's what I've been feeling about the weather in Vermont lately. 

By lately, I actually mean the past two or three years. 

Every day, I wake up to some new weather extreme and catastrophe somewhere in the world. We've always had weather disasters, but climate change is making many of those calamities worse than they otherwise would be.

Here in Vermont, almost nothing in that regard lately, thank goodness. We've been coasting along with pretty benign conditions for a few years. Our current beautiful, relatively cool summer is Example A.  Don't get me wrong, I'm really, really enjoying every minute of this benign weather. 

Also, think about it.  We've been lucky for awhile now. Oh sure, we've had our share of weird weather. Sometimes stuff we hadn't experienced before, like 95 degree heat in May in 2020, or the unprecedented March tornado that touched down in Middlebury last year, things like that.

And we've had our usual local flash floods, wind storms, ice storms, snow storms, rain storms, droughts, strange temperature swings. It's Vermont. The weather can be challenging every once in awhile. We deal with it.   

But honestly, truly destructive weather has been pretty rare in Vermont since the big flood and windstorm of Halloween, 2019, which prompted disaster declarations in several Vermont counties. (True, another federal disaster was declared for damaging floods in Bennington and Windham Counties in July, 2021, but flooding was fairly localized, and not super extreme by modern standards).

We in Vermont have been blissfully skating by for the past three years. In that time, some areas of the nation have been blitzed by repeated storms, floods, wildfires or other emergencies. Examples are everywhere. It seems like every time I turn around, a new extreme derecho or storm is sweeping South Dakota and Iowa.  Yeah, yeah, I know they get a lot of storms there, but the ones lately have been bizarre.

Fires keeping hitting California, floods seemingly come one after another along the East Coast and Midwest, and hurricanes seem to be competing with each other, trying to see which one can wreak the most havoc on the American coastline. 

Meanwhile, on our safe little island in Vermont, we've been lucky.  T weather has been benign. Nice. Pleasant. Safe. You won't hear me complain about that!  

Arguably the last really serious weather disaster in Vermont
was the flood and windstorm on Oct. 31-Nov. 1, 2019.
This tree fell over in our yard during that storm, '
crushing Jeff's Jeep. 

Today's another gorgeous day in Vermont. We had a lovely sunrise.  It'll be another mostly sunny afternoon with pretty, puffy clouds dotting the blue sky, comfortable temperatures and low humidity. Looking ahead over the next few days, the weather will stay nice. We're blessed again! 

Since I can't help myself, though, a small part of me is waiting for the other shoe to drop. Sooner or later, we'll have a year like 1998 or 2011, when weather disasters swept Vermont over and over again. Or will we have something else, like the deadly heat waves that attacked Europe, Russia and southwestern Canada in recent years?

Climate change is in the back of my mind, too. The weather in the Green Mountain State has been generally gorgeous, but still, certainly warmer than what was considered average back in the day.

Climate change is also driving storms that are more fierce, wetter, more violent than in the past.  When will our luck run out? 

I guess it's not worth obsessing over, because all we can do is enjoy what we've got. Sure, we can adjust our lifestyle to help combat climate change and elect leaders who will do the same. Yes, we can still mitigate things and make the future climate less bad than it otherwise would be.

But really, the next Big Bad Thing in Vermont is inevitable, and we'll just have to brace for it. Hopefully it will not come anytime soon.  After work today, I'll go out on the deck, maybe with a gin and tonic or a glass of wine, enjoy the gorgeous summer landscape, smell the flowers Jeff and I planted and listen to the symphony of bird song. 

If that's what it takes to calm me down and erase my fears, well, there are worse things I can do.