La Niña, someone told me recently, is causing our winters here in the Pacific Northwest to occur in March and April now.  I tried to check that out online and, from what I can see, it’s probably true.  What I can’t quite figure out is what that makes January and February.  Are they still considered winter months?  Or are they now in the autumn category?    And are we going to now have five months of winter instead of three?
     Colder and wetter is one thing, but what’s with all these thunder storms and gale-force winds?  A section of our neighbor’s fence blew down the other day.  The next day her flowering cherry (I think it’s a cherry) blew over.  It’s all in bud, lying on the ground, broken off at lawn level.  I felt sorry for it.  Just ready to burst into flower and WHAM!  La Niña attacks!
     La Niña brings snow and rain on the west coast, unusually cold weather in Alaska, unusually warm weather in the rest of the USA, drought in the southwest, and higher than normal number of hurricanes in the Atlantic.  It doesn’t seem comforting that the La Niña weather pattern happens only about half as often as El Niño.
     El Niño – Spanish for “Little Boy” – was first ‘discovered’ hundreds of years ago by fishermen off the coast of Peru, so that explains the language situation.   Since it comes around Christmastime, it was named for the Christ Child.   The weather it brings isn’t anything to write home about either – rain and flooding along the Pacific coast; warm water that disrupts the food chain of fish, birds, and sea mammals; tornadoes and thunderstorms in the southern United States.  The best part might be that fewer than normal hurricanes happen in the Atlantic during an El Niño period.
     La Niña means “Little Girl” – opposite weather conditions, opposite name.  On the other hand, the La Niña weather pattern can also be called El Viejo, which means “Old Man.”  (Go figure!)  La Niña is sometimes called “The Diva of Drought” – obviously not a nickname coined here in the Northwest.  “Diva of Drench” would be more like it.
     Mostly, of course, I want to know whether I can count on wearing an Easter Bonnet… or do I need to rethink along the lines of an Easter Stocking Cap?  Will we have Spring?  Or will we leap right into Summer?  Or does this dire prediction mean that everything will just be colder and wetter for longer?  And who invented La Niña anyway?  They didn’t have that when I was a girl!