I went to the Lilac for her wisdom. Asked: how can I protect my little pear trees from this false spring? But she had nothing but boughs full of blackbirds to show me. False spring is climate change’s ‘now you see spring, now you don’t‘ trick – an extreme cold snap between budburst and leaf out, catching the tender trees at their most vulnerable. Lilac thought she had seen it all, living as she does in the shadow of a disused silver mill. At the mill, ore was crushed into slime then treated in a cyanidation process to extract the silver. The toxic tailings were sluiced out to a nearby lake. So the past, this environmental damage, and the future, this weather of ambush, weigh on Lilac. But the present gives her enough to worry about: sheltering the blackbirds, who had also all told each other it was spring.
Brit Griffin
Brit Griffin is the author of the cli-fi trilogy The Wintermen and lives in northern Ontario.
