It’s been a long blooming season for my daffodils but a tough one. They’ve survived at least three snowfalls in the last week plus wind and rain. After each battering I go out and rescue the ones that are absolutely facedown in the snow or dirt, put them in vases, and enjoy them inside by the woodstove–that is, if I get around to building a fire.

The sun is shining on the remnants of this morning’s blizzard. My latest rescue effort has garnered a fat bouquet of 30 daffodils. If my husband brings in some wood I’ll light a fire this afternoon. There are worse things to do on an April Saturday than clean up the house, pretend it’s the middle of winter, and watch movies.

Normally I love April. By now my so-called lawn should be a carpet of pink, white, and yellow ephemeral wildflowers–spring beauties, cutleaf toothwort, trout lilies. False rue anemones should be succeeding the hepatica in the woods. I should be raking leaves off the rock garden, taking walks down to the wet prairie, picking up roadside trash. I should be having my morning tea on the porch.

Instead, snow.

OK, let’s be grateful that this morning’s snow is melting fast, no need to shovel. That the aptly named glory-of-the-snow is blooming along the brick walk.

Let’s be grateful for the here-and-now, whatever it is, because nagging dissatisfaction is not an attitude to carry one through life–or through the increasing turbulence of our changing climate.

Because these strange extremes are nothing, compared to what our grandchildren will experience.

I’m trying to think of what attitudes work best, what will work best to carry us through difficult times. Difficult times brought on by changing climate. Difficult times disciplining ourselves to do what we can and must to address it. Difficult times confronting the intractable divisions in our society that pit us against each other and our earth.

This vague anomie that I feel, something not too far from self-pity, when I’m just sick and tired of a winter that has gone on too long, does not seem all that serviceable. Rather, I’m looking for some combination of joy and anger, gratitude and determination, confidence and humility, sorrow and ferocity and aplomb.

Presence. Grace. Seeing. Love, blooming and blooming again, anyhow.