Nature is Never Spent

Let's see, I recently posted about snow, didn't I? It's pretty typical for the winter weather here to swing between cold-ish and a bit too warm. The day before New Year's Eve, I was out and about in short sleeves. Then January 1, I found what is normally one of the first signs of spring: Spring Beauty blooming in the lawn. I'm concerned that the trees will get confused and not even have their necessary dormant time if this continues. But from a purely human point of view, despite my disappointment in not getting to use my winter hats and scarves yet, I have to say it's been pretty pleasant. It's not like spring, which is often humid and uncomfortable. It's chilly at night, dry and sunny during the day and usually just cool enough for a light jacket. I've been putting houseplants out on the porch to get some extra light.



Yesterday, I spotted winter-blooming jasmine on the bush growing "wild" at a cabin in the woods. It's like spring in January.

For the past few days I have been in a quick road trip north. Whenever I travel north in the spring, I feel like I'm traveling back in time. Seasonal time, anyway. I went from trees in full bloom and daffodils fading to patches of snow on the ground frozen ponds just starting to thin in places, and trees still utterly bare. It was exciting to see snow again.



I love watching the changes in types of flora too, and I rarely get to observe in winter. Up north there are lots of birch and maple and spruce. Headed south, by the time we hit central Missouri, it's almost all hardwoods, particularly oak, with the only wild conifers being southern red cedar, and the river bottoms are all filled with tall old sycamores. Finally, close to home we start to see the southern pines mixed in with everything that grows a zone or two north.

We also cross a low old mountain range, and it was uncanny the way we reached the river valley south of one range and oh, there was a wild plum blooming on the top of a ridge, and then there were white-blooming trees everywhere! In places it seemed they accounted for half the tree population. Another hour of driving, and we even spotted some redbuds blooming.

Even though I didn't have my fill of cold weather and exotic northern trees, it feels good to be home among the familiar.

It's spring-like, right down to the muggy weather, lethargy and impending thunderstorms. But there are still signs of last week's snow, mainly the large grains of salt on the walks, the sheet of beige sand pushed to the middle and edges of some roads, and a few rapidly shrinking piles of ugly, dirty snow where it was pushed off of parking lots. I've been documenting the melting of a pile of snow right where I park: on the 14th, 15th, 16th, and today.

I also see meandering concentric lines of salt where puddles formed on the pavement, then evaporated leaving the salt behind.

I frequently check on the goldfish in the fountain pool outside my office, always with a tiny bit of trepidation after the weather has been wild. On Friday when the campus was briefly open after the snow, I saw that the whole pool had frozen over. The ice was cloudy, almost white, as if it was composed of slush that piled up on the surface of the water, then froze overnight. Someone had broken out a corner of the ice, and through the chunks I could see... blotches of bright orange. They were fine. There are at least nine still there now, with the ice all melted and the water warmed up in the springlike weather that followed. I salute your hardiness, goldfish!

It will be hard for folks in the great white North who get twice this amount in one storm, but with 14" total, this is the 7th snowiest winter ever recorded in my city. Today, there was a lot of melting. The evergreen tree that started the day looking like Winter Wonderland ended it with clumps of mush sliding off and plopping on the ground. On the roads, melt created rivers of icy clear water and a really messy gray slush that sprayed on to me when cars passed. However, I don't know how this works, but the undisturbed areas of snow were covered with the most sparkliest snow ever. Flat crystals of snow almost like sequins, or fish scales. The snow underneath was soft and powdery. I love walking through it. It feels like if you fell straight back, it would catch you like feathers.

It's chilly enough today, but so gloriously sunny, with just a few fluffy clouds, I caught myself searching the grassy spots in my well-traveled walk from my office to my car. I know exactly where the bluets and Spring beauty will appear, and it seemed almost like the kind of day when they'd start making the attempt. It isn't unheard of in February, though not usually this early. And I may not have seen any flowers, but wouldn't you know it, I got home and noticed a tiny new green leaf in one of my pots of dormant peppermint runners.



Tomorrow I expect things will be greatly changed, at least for another day or two.

Snow reminds me of Friday night high school football games, behind the bleachers where the majorettes got ready with cans of glitter spray.

Snow sparkles.

We got real snow! It started in the morning, after everyone had already arrived at work and school. I happened to be in a classroom with windows, so I opened the blinds and kept an eye on it while we continued class.

It wasn't much, really, just enough at first to make the already-chilled surfaces look like they'd been spray painted white, but those big, fluffy clumps of snowflakes falling were as heart-lifting a sight for me as cirrus clouds.



Bu the time it started snowing, it was quite a bit warmer than the day before, when I had wondered about the folk wisdom "too cold to snow." It can't really be too cold to snow, apparently; snow happens in some incredibly cold places, it's just that when it gets really cold it's harder for much vapor to exist in the air, making the snow possible.

Imbolc, we're halfway from Winter Solstice to Spring. Today was an ice day!

Okay, not an ice day in the sense of "ice coating every outdoor surface and shutting down all movement and services," which is probably our most common kind of winter severe weather here. It was just very cold, and we'd had rain yesterday, so there was white, shiny stuff to look at here and there. I'll take it. In fact, it's quite cold inside my apartment and there was a quarter of an inch of ice on the inside of my bedroom window in the morning. It was pretty, with some streaks running down the white glaze where a few drops had started to melt.



All the puddles were frozen, of course, and by afternoon I noticed something that spoke to a universal quality of humans: all the the puddles were broken into pieces. Because ice is fun to crunch. :)

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A little note on yesterday's raindroppy scene from where I park at work: it looked so different today, you almost wouldn't know it.

It was a gorgeous day.

Whenever we have a day like this after the winter solstice or new year, sunny and unseasonably warm, I get a little lump of dread called Summer's Coming. I spend a good part of the day trying to control that anxiety and enjoy weather that anyone in the frozen north would give a toe for—weather which, if it occurred during my actual summers, I would greet as a miracle.

Despite that unattractive inner struggle, I did take advantage, drying laundry outside and walking the dogs in the woods. The men were hard at work rebuilding and repairing several pasture gates. The sky was oh so clear and blue and the air fresh and breezy—at least until woodsmoke began rolling in.



It was odd, because although many people in this rural area heat their homes with woodburning stoves, nobody should have needed heat in that weather. The answer was that the weather was so amazing, everyone decided to take advantage and do outdoor chores, and one of those chores was burning brush.

It reminded me that when I was driving in the night before, as soon as I entered the hills, I had started smelling smoke, and I thought the Forest Service must be doing some controlled burns. But the next day was breezy, and I knew the Forest Swrvice crews wouldn't be that unwise. It turned out, of course, that plenty of individual folks are that dumb, and as a result there were several small wildfires around the county. The rural volunteer fire departments were being overwhelmed and the county had to issue an emergency burn ban.

Nature gives us an amazing day, and sometimes we don't quite know how to appreciate it and use it best. Still though... amazing day.