Getting Ugly

Mike, the great equalizer and voice of reason, tells me that dogs get ugly with age.  Kola, Queen of the River, seems to be doing just that.  She is sprouting lumps here and there, a wart now and then, and at six, limps after too much outside work.

And so it is with Winter as well.  What two months ago was a magical transformer and a boon to the spirit is getting mighty unattractive in her advancing months.   Our consistent multi-inch snowfalls have melted away leaving three inches of bumpy, slick ice behind.  The little snow left on roadsides is black and pitted.  The cottonwoods along the river were ringed with tables of ice a few weeks ago, making the whole place look like a fairy world, missing only teacups and vases of hoar-frosted goldenrod on their shelves.  What remains at the river are planks of ice extending beyond the banks, over the water, inviting human or dog to peer over the edge into depths far warmer than the air.  I am seduced daily there, onto the six inches of ice which look as if they could support a tank, but are in reality fragmented, uneven, and treacherous.   The continual flooding, freezing, receding, thawing and re-freezing has created massive platforms of ice with  twelve inches of nothingness between them and the frozen soil.  We never know, with each step we take, when we'll be on something solid and when we'll crash through to earth, usually in mid-sentence, tongue between teeth.  I have learned to walk through winter with my mouth shut.

We've been in the belly of it since Thanksgiving, when our first snow fell.  Relatively speaking, that's not a long time.  Two months.  And what's ahead of us is a lot--we've only received half of our expected snowfall, and have another eight weeks before we can really count on the end of sub-zero nights.

But, as the weather gods are intuitive gods indeed, they knew we were tired of Winter and sent us  40+ degrees over the weekend as reminder that the world will one day come un-frozen.   They didn't give us much, but it was something. And the world, in response, sent up a collective cheer and went outside.  I found a goldenrod spider dangling from a line of silk in the woods, and though I warned her that she was too early to come out of her hiding place I  guessed she was just testing the air and  basking in the promise of another Spring, as were Kola and I.

There's a lot to look forward to in the coming weeks.  I will be able to force buds and then flowers out of forsythia and crabapple branches in a few weeks.  Thanks to Naomi's phenological work, I know that by the 5th of March the Red-winged Blackbirds will be back .   The males, noisy and welcome, show up in my cottonwood and pussy-willow in late February most years--and if i pay attention, I may notice the females return a week or so ahead of their mates.   Maple buds will be swelling by mid-February, and Great-Horned Owls will be on eggs by Valentine's Day.  A scant four weeks from now Red-Tailed Hawk pairs will start flying together again, whoever of the skunk and raccoon people is yet asleep will wake,  and there will be new squirrel kits in their nests.  And the crows......they will let me know Spring is truly waiting when I see them wheeling through the sky together, rolling and diving their black-winged way toward the sun.