Bubbles burst While-U-Wait

Groundhog Day, February 2nd, has come and gone. This year any illusions I might have retained from days gone by about the accuracy of meteorologic prognostications by certain oversized rodents came crashing down yesterday morning.

I was in my car around 9:00 a.m. and the sun, which had been up for over an hour and a half, was shining brightly, as it had been doing all morning. I turned my radio on to catch the news.

Prominently featured among the stories was the fact that the world’s most famous groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil of Gobbler’s Knob, Pennsylvania (I don’t know why he isn’t in Punxsutawney and frankly, I don’t care), had seen his shadow and had scampered back into his burrow, thus assuring that six more weeks of winter was in the offing. It was then reported that Atlanta’s local equivalent of Punxsutawney Phil, General Beauregard Lee of Yellow River Game Ranch in Lilburn, Georgia (never mind that heretofore his reporting has been from Stone Mountain), had not seen his shadow and thus we would be enjoying an early spring.

I nearly drove off the road.

Make that I nearly drove off the road, blinded by the sunshine.

We have already been enjoying an early spring. This winter has been much milder than last year’s, and splashes of purple phlox and yellow forsythia and a few jonquils are already showing up here and there. The temperature has even made it into the seventies a time or two. That wasn’t what made me nearly drive off the road.

What made me nearly drive off the road was trying to figure out how General Beauregard Lee could have avoided seeing his shadow when there was nary (all us old Southerners say nary) a cloud in the sky and I was reaching for my sunglasses.

This put me to thinking that perhaps General Beauregard Lee is nothing more than a mute mammal and it is his human handlers and publicists, in cahoots with the weather departments at the local television stations, who decide what the breathlessly-awaited annual announcement will be.

Yes, Virginia, there may be a Santa Claus, but there is not, alas,
a reliable groundhog in these parts.