Spring: Right/Left and Holiday Lights, Too

According to the calendar, it’s officially spring, although these photos taken today might seem to indicate otherwise. I do hope it was a lovely spring day wherever you are.

Here in NH, Husband No. 1 observed the new season by attempting to remove some of the Christmas lights from the bushes and trees now that enough snow has melted to extricate some of the extension cords from the ice.

But as you can see from these photos, we still have far too much of the white stuff on the ground to remove all the strings of lights, thanks to the second-largest snow total in NH history. (If you look carefully, you can see a string still hanging from the branch in the foreground. I'm planning to shape it into an Easter bunny if necessary.)

Ain’t global warming grand? Experts say climate disruption is sending excess amounts of moisture into the atmosphere (think glaciers melting and water going up into the air just like in those water cycle charts we all had learn in school) and therefore, extreme weather is going to continue.

And now we’re mixing in some Japanese nuclear radiation, too. Can it get any worse?

I realize these aren’t very positive, hopeful thoughts in line with a spring-like attitude of reawakening and rebirth and for that I apologize, but I’m writing this from the hospital emergency room where my mother was taken by ambulance after suffering chest pain along with a nasty flu bug, which also has now afflicted my father whose family birthday brunch was canceled today as a result of this lovely virus.

Fortunately, both are improving and the Code Blue going off elsewhere in the ER appears to be a technical glitch. So there is some good news on this first day of spring.

In the midst of this medical adventure, I received a call from my brother who was attempting to negotiate my parents’ washing machine and he and my father could not figure out why it wasn’t working after attempting to turn on the cold water going into the appliance. Turns out the wrong faucet handle was used. This surprised my mother, who observed from her hospital bed that, of course, everyone knows which temperature of water comes from the faucet handle on the left and which pours forth when you turn the handle on the right.

Is that true? Without looking, can you quickly state which one delivers hot water and which one provides cold?

I admitted that I would have to think about this, prompting my mother to respond that anyone who is observant would know this. She laughed when she said it, so at least I knew she was feeling much better. Nonetheless, as someone whose former profession relied heavily on observation skills, I took offense to this. But then I realized that faucet handles just aren’t important to me. I suppose I either turn both to produce a lovely blend of lukewarm, or maybe I choose hot or cold instinctively.

Suffice it to say faucet handles are NOT something I spend a great deal of time thinking about, especially when I’m preoccupied by more important subjects – like the rate of snow melt and the shame that comes from still having Christmas lights up in mid-March.

In the hope of proving I do indeed possess some powers of observation, I will note here that there are an unexpectedly large number of homes in my city that still have Christmas wreaths on their front doors even though the owners would merely have to open said doors to remove the now brown and ugly decorations, not shovel through a snowbank of historic proportions, as most front doors seem to open to the inside. (I have at least observed that.)

But perhaps my fellow citizens are preoccupied with other things, too. Maybe global warming and radiation drifting over from Japan, for example.

So, what do you think: does "everyone" automatically know which faucet handle delivers hot water and is it a major faux pas to have your Christmas decorations still on display in spring?

Inquiring minds want to know. (And I'd rather be thinking about snow melting than nuclear melting, wouldn't you?)