Last Bit of Winter

Spring has sprung. Or has it. Just kidding. It totally has and I have tiny white lantern snowdrops in my garden to prove it. But this is not a gardening story. Nay, the garden will have to wait. Until what? Well, since you asked I will tell you, but the answer is goofball at best. I would tell you it must be true because I read it in a book and not on the internet, but really it sounds more like Monty Python-penned myth than anything else. I have a slim volume on olde timey gardening lore, which explains the farmer’s foolproof method for telling when it’s planting time. You should probably pronounce time, “tahm”, in your head if this story is going to feel at all legit. And when I say farmers, think men in overalls and straw hats looking like eager background extras in a local cast production of Oklahoma. So, these farmers would wait until nighttime, drop their trousers and sit bare-arsed on the ground. If the ground was cold to the buttocks’ touch, then it wasn’t planting time yet. However, if that very farmer could drop his trousers and sit comfortably upon the warm earth, then, yes, it was time. Makes absolute sense to me. No, I haven’t tried it.

But, never say never—pun intended. I have other fish to fry. Like how I’m going to empty out the 30 gallon garbage can in my garbage hutch that’s filled with water. Seems the hutch lid was left up by a kindly waste management employee and it rained. A lot. Water filled all the way up to the very top then froze. So now it’s too heavy to lift up and out and can’t be tipped over—no room. I will have to lean over and down into the hutch, head first, and bail out the water now that it’s no longer frozen, trying not to lose my balance and fall, head first, into my garbage can like some cartoon. Come to think of it, I should probably have a spotter. At least it didn’t freeze with a bag of garbage encased in ice. That would be something.

Meanwhile, my son said goodbye to the snow the other day, or what was left of the white snow. He knelt down in our yard, patted it and kissed it goodbye. “See ya,” he said, “it was really fun having you around and I liked how you made everything so bright and cool looking. Plus the sledding was awesome.” I said, “Don’t forget the snow days,” and he said, “Oh, right,” and thanked the snow gods for all the luxurious time away from school. Then he picked up a piece and added it to the plastic cup in our freezer of snow left over from two winters ago. It’s melted a few times when the fridge has gone out, but still counts as snow in my book.

My guilty pleasure this spring will consist of seeing how long it takes the gigunda mountains of filthy snow at all the vast parking lots to melt. Will there still be tiny sooty vestiges of our wintry wonderland left at the end of April? Beginning of May? Some of those piles are mountainous and I imagine teen snowboarders in T-shirts sneaking out at night to hop on their boards one more time in the temperate Springtime air. I also love seeing what’s been buried under those piles all winter. Bits of trash, broken shovels, deflated balls, frozen in time like dinosaur fossils trapped in amber. There are only a scant few weekends left of quiet before the leaf blowers resume their aural assault and the garden explodes, begging for attention. I think I’ll spend them wrapping up indoor projects, picking up errant trash off the street, bailing out my garbage can and watching the black snow unceremoniously disappear.

Snow Days

The snow is finally melting-- at least this batch is-- and as with anyone who’s muddled though this past winter, I’m thrilled about spring’s debut, but I’m also a little sad. “What?!” you say? Before you hack at your computer screen with scissors, please hear me out. I actually enjoyed all the snow. Not because I’m a big cold-weather snow-person. To the contrary, I loathe being cold. But there were some very cool things about this past winter that I want to gingerly bring up before you pack it in, label it “The Worst Winter In Recent Memory” then shove it away in a shoe box under your bed.

Living out here as we do in the burbs, the snow stayed pristine and lovely for ages as opposed to you-know-where where it turns sooty, grubby and grey within 48 hours. Our snow gave us a bonus landscape that really was quite magnificent and remained visually awe inspiring for so long that every last one of us had to succumb to it’s beauty. We had no choice.

I loved that for a while—okay, a looong while—we lived not in our familiar town, but in an alternate version of our town. Dark green grass and brown mud took a hike for a while and we were left living in a stunning black and white portrait; stark yet beautiful. It was as if a surreptitious roving band of midnight art directors descended upon us, blanketed our world with soap flakes and glued cotton batting to every branch, and then took off, leaving a version of what we knew to be our town in it’s place for free. How lucky were we to be lifted out of the visually mundane with the added peace of mind that it would definitely end; that this is a limited run, and this snow will melt for certain.

I loved that we had to completely rethink our relationship with snow. It became more nuanced and complex as the weeks passed and the snow continued to pile up. In the past, we could chalk snow up to a brief dalliance or mad tryst, but this time we were forced into a more mature relationship with snow and had to learn to live with it and accept its shortcomings. Collectively, we all became more mindful of its demands and I for one learned a ton. I learned when to shovel after the snowfall and how not to wait too long-- the hard way. I became intimate with the turning radius of my car and appreciative of the design that goes into a good shovel. I learned that a six inch snowfall is nuthin.’ I learned to watch for the days that the air would rise above 32 degrees and what that square edged shovel in the back of the garage was perfect for. Like gardening, the snow had to be cultivated, cut back and groomed. It had to be cared for; nurtured and nudged.

For those of you in a long distance love affair with a beguiling Inuit Eskimo lass or on the fence about whether or not to move north, we got the chance to see what it would be like to live in Fargo, Anchorage or the Ukraine without actually having to move there to check it out. “No, thank you!” I can now answer with gusto should someone ever ask me if I might like to live there. “I had a brief taste back in 2011, and yes, I’m sure the answer is no. But thanks for asking.” How lucky we are to remove all doubt.

But the biggest reason I’ll miss the snow is the general kindness we were forced to hang on to long after we’d dismantled our holiday lights. Over and over again I danced with the stranger in the oncoming car, slowing down to navigate our single lane together. Many times a day I accepted the offer of “You first,” and as many times extended it outward. These gestures were often acknowledged with a quick flash of the headlights, or a small wave. But each time-- as with every conversation I had with my weary neighbors while out shoveling or breaking up the ice—I was reminded that we were in it together. That we were a team. Sure, chit-chat turned to grumbling early on for most, but it didn’t bother me. I listened politely and nodded in agreement as I looked around at the magnificent wonderland that had transformed our mini-mall parking lot or simple, little street and thought—wow, spectacular. How lucky are we.