It was the wrong time to be there, at my desk, room lit up by the descending sun. I have an atypically nice office: two giant windows that overlook Lake Erie, plants, art, and openness since my coworker figured out how I could rotate my desk. At that moment, I was bathed in this warm sunlight, an ambience that amplified as it reflected off the beige walls. It’s lighting that you want to keep, but only comes for moments because time never stops and the earth, thus far, has not stopped turning.

Eventually I left, earlier than intended, as a friend had texted me – he was already at the Clean Air Coalition meeting I was staying late to attend. He was being useful and setting things up. I was going to show up and reap the benefits of his labor. I figured this was also an opportunity to enjoy his company, so I shut the computer down and grabbed my biking gear. There was plenty of time before the meeting would start.

Office building interiors are temperature controlled and don’t feel real. Pushing open the exterior door, I walked out into warm gold late afternoon light and into a warmth that felt like a hug. It was February. It’s been a mild winter, just one bad storm and hardly any other snow. We greeted that storm with a begrudging understanding that winter was finally here; it seemed to retreat immediately afterward. I have biked to work almost every day, most days fighting cold on dry pavement. That day’s biking felt like May, or June, the only thing different is that the angle of the light betrayed the time of year.

I biked to the location of the meeting, Trinity Episcopal Church, and I could have gone inside, to another unreal climate. I let my friend know I was nearby and loitered. It was days before my birthday and I realized, in that moment, the thing I felt most was alive. It was warm, it was Golden Hour, and I had energy. I felt the air and observed the buildings and walked. Ran into an acquaintance and had a pleasant conversation. And kept walking.

Everyone loves these days as they happen but also have an anxiety about them. It feels like the pleasure of a sin: lovely in the moment, but not fully enjoyable because its source is something destructive. People around me recognize that this unseasonable warmth comes from the climate change from over a century of poor environmental stewardship. We instinctually understand that February is not supposed to be this mild. My crocuses are not supposed to have their beautiful purple petals open and extending towards the sky on March 8. This is winter, but save one storm, it seems winter mostly forgot to come.

Part of me feels like the early arrival of spring was somehow unearned. I grew up with long winters, deep snow, and cold. Buffalo has a sharper cold than my childhood home did – we’re closer to the Lake, the wind more unencumbered when it hits us. But this year, Lake Erie did not freeze. From my window, I could see the ice boom floating in liquid water the entire season. Winter is usually a time of retreat. It’s dark and cold and you stay inside. We kept the dark but the cold was not so severe. A broken cycle.

It’s lovely and I feel alive at the same time feeling like a cheat and like I am touching the edges of a foretold doom. What to do about it? My biking is a political act: my gift to my grandchildren are whatever greenhouse gases I don’t put into the atmosphere. I make my consumption decisions with the environment in mind. Even the meeting I was attending was coming from that wish to make this place more sustainable. Yet. I am so small on a scale of the entire earth. I haven’t been here even four decades in a place where the scale of time seems closer to eternity. A pebble cannot control the ocean. I have climate anxiety but also cannot deny the beauty of the immediate moment when it is a beautifully pleasant day.

The cause is not lost. It is also not a solitary one. There’s nothing to do but what you can. There’s no place to be but now. So I was and so I will be because there’s no other way.