Climate Change? Global warming?

We've had a fairly bitterly cold January this year, here in the midwest. We've had a lot of cold, cold days. Plenty of freezing temperatures.

And that's no surprise.

January is, like the rest of the continent, our coldest month.

But this weekend, the last day of that coldest month of the year, the temperature, thankfully, shot up to 70 degrees.

I don't know what it was officially but it was wonderfully, blissfully, forgivingly warm.

And sunny.

Sure, we had some pretty good winds with it, too, but hey, we took it, for sure. It was welcome relief from winter.

At about 10 o'clock in the morning--still fairly early in the day--I was walking the few blocks back from a weekly breakfast get-together, when all of a sudden I saw a few robins in a nearby backyard--3 or four.

January 31st.

I have to tell you, as a kid, I walked to school every day.

No, it wasn't "uphill both ways in the snow" but all my brothers and sisters and I walked to school. It was only less than two miles to school--too close to be bussed and way before children weren't safe on our streets.

So over the years, I've virtually always paid attention to the flora and fauna I passed on these walks, at whatever age and whatever the locale.

Come Spring, on these walks, it's safe to say I always remembered when the robins came back to our city.

That would have been a big day for me.

I would have announced that, at least to family.

So I remember that robins came back, what? March? April?

Like I said, that was a big day and time for me.

Like most of us, I loved the warmer, sunnier, longer days of Spring. Any sign they were 100% returned was huge for me. Shoot, that would have been true for most of us here in the dreary, gray and brown midwest.

So I know, as a child, the robins used to leave.

And they didn't return for a long, long time.

Now, it seems, they don't really leave our area.

And maybe that only means officially, scientifically, a one-degree change in our median temperatures. Maybe even just a half point change.

Not a big thing.

Yet.

But it's a change.

There have been letters to the editor of the local newspaper--The Kansas City Star--saying "so much for global warming" or some such idea.

Well, when you put together the fact that last year was still officially one of the top ten warmest years, with this, either the return of robins at the end of January--or the fact that they never left, it that's the case--it seems to make the point that things are changing.

And maybe we should do what we can to clean up how we live, so the future won't be so dirty or potentially negative otherwise.