There are those who assume that people who live in New York City care only about rushing around from place to place and accomplishing supposedly important things. Actually, though, New Yorkers love their nature. And the most beloved of all natural places in the city is Central Park, the 2½-mile long, half-mile wide refuge of woodlands, ponds, ball fields, a skating rink, meadows, and majestic trees.

Now, on February 1, 2023, New Yorkers are lamenting the absence of a treasured feature of the park: snow. As regular reports on the city’s public radio station have been tallying for listeners, this is the 328^th day in which the park has received no measurable snow, or a fall of at least one inch. That’s the longest span without snow since meteorologists began keeping records in 1869. This winter, no white festoons have draped the trees and bushes, no jaunty caps grace the head of the Shakespeare and other statues. and the slopes are bare of adults, children, and dogs playing in snow.

In “Climate grief: How we mourn a changing planet,” an article in the BBC’s Future publication, Panu Pihkala, a Radical Joy for Hard Times member from Finland, names “winter grief” and “snow anxiety” as types of climate anxiety that Nordic people face. Snow anxiety in Finnish is lumiahdistus, writes Pihkala, Adjunct Professor in Environmental Theology at the University of Helsinki, and it’s felt by young and old alike. “Children love to play in the snow, while older people either ski or feel more at home in the traditional snowy conditions. The loss of light, which comes with the loss of snow which reflects light, increases the health impacts of climate change, both physical and mental.”

One way to address the pain of grief for a season and its gifts is to acknowledge and speak about them, says Pikhala. “At its best, a grief process leads to the revitalisation of a person’s energies, to an ability to reinvest meaning in those practices of life that seem elementary. The world is now different and I am different, but there can still be meaning in life.”