WE'RE MELTING!...

(You all know how to read that, right?)

Sadness. It hit 50 yesterday, I think.

Valentine's Day promises to be drippy and wet, muddy and dirty. There's still a lot of snow in a lot of places (since there was so much of it) but a lot of it is looking brown. Places where there were valleys (as opposed to drifts), I see grass...

Are We There Yet?

This morning, kept inside by the brutally cold weather, I read the book I'm in Charge of Celebrations by Byrd Baylor/Peter Parnall with my kindergarten students. (Interesting... I obviously recognize the importance of using children's literature, and I love reading myself... but I only see each of my classes once a week, for 60 or 90 minutes. And I want to get the small people outside (also the Naomi outside). And I'm not a reading teacher. So I don't use that much children's literature in my classes... maybe 10 books per year over all the grades. And a really high percentage of them are Baylor/Parnall books. I have used at least 4 so far this year. Their style -- both writing and drawing, just really appeals to me.) Do you all like my nested parentheses? I write like I think... which is, apparently, randomly.

Anyhow. If you're not familiar with the book, it's about a girl who creates her own holidays based on the spectacular things she gets to witness in nature. Written long before Last Child in the Woods, the narrator points out more than once that if she were inside, instead of going outside in her free time, she would have missed all those things, and she must be the luckiest person...

After reading the book, each student creates their own "nature celebration" -- some really memorable thing that they experienced in nature that they "plan to remember the rest of [their] life," as the book says. Kids come up with all sorts of things... from Snow Drift Day that just happened last week to Rock Collecting Day that clearly occurred in the summer sometime (based on the illustration), things they saw in their back yard (Opossum Day) to things they saw on vacation somewhere distant (Giant Wave Day).

A few kids always get stuck (they're kindergarteners, after all) and need to be coached to think of things to celebrate, and today, that conversation nearly transported me. "Do you remember a time when you saw the first spring flower, maybe? Or got really close to an animal?"

And, all of a sudden, in my head... it's last spring, First Dragonfly Day. A favorite day of mine because I love dragonflies so, and miss watching them terribly during the winter months. In a stuffy classroom on a frigid day, I can feel the warmth on my face. I squint my eyes to protect them from the sun sparkling on the pond water. And I watch the green darner swoop, turning and gliding, close to me and then away again. I lose it in the cattails, search, find it again as it darts about. It is huge (for an insect, I mean) and colorful. Time stops in that moment... whatever I was doing, wherever I was going, doesn't matter anymore.

Too often I'm focused on getting things done, checked off, moving on to the next thing, making each class work and getting my schedule to work with 25 other teachers' schedules. I celebrate that while I can be a very focused person, I can also get sidetracked from my focus by a soaring odonate... a flock of chickadees whistling through the still winter air... a fortunate argiope wrapping up a rather unlucky grasshopper... a perfect squirrel track... and a million other extraordinary everyday things that I am lucky enough to run into.

That's the optimistic take-home lesson. The less positive version? I have loved this snowfall. A week later, the world still seems magical and new and fresh and exciting, especially after 2 months of mostly snow-free coldness. But I, despite my upper-Midwest history including 5 Minnesota winters, am not as big a fan of winter as I feel like I should be... or as I used to be... or as I used to pretend, even to myself, that I was.

I hate having to wear multiple layers each day, and feeling constrained and puffy. I don't enjoy being boiling hot in indoor spaces that are heated to feel like summer. (Granted, this happens with over-air conditioning in the summer, but it's a lot easier to carry a long sleeved shirt to put on indoors than to get my long underwear off from under my clothing.) I am inconvenienced by having to spend 10 minutes getting ready to go outside. I feel oppressed by waking up in the dark and eating dinner in the dark. And I just miss the delicate veins of leaves, the pools of color in flower petals, the soaring dragonflies.

I definitely feel the need for at least some winter. I lived for a year in southern Georgia where it never froze and there was green algae growing all over my car, which didn't live in a garage and which I didn't wash (very often. There was this one time, when I went to a carwash, but one of our cats had decided to nap in the warmth of my car, unbeknown to me... and he freaked out like I have never seen a cat freak out before or since, and did some damage to the interior of my car and probably his shaky cat sanity. But that's another story for another time). Anyhow... The palmetto bugs -- which is just a code for native roach -- got huge and crawled everywhere. And in general, nature seemed inhospitable in the more temperate climate... there were all manner of poisonous, biting, stinging things that can't survive a cold winter, and that seemed to never die and nested in very inconvenient places. Here I am referring mostly to the large black spiders that kept crawling out of the air vents in my car. So I want a good killing frost. (Or alternately, a car-free life.) More than that, even. I like how a good long snow cover erases my failures to trim back the garden. Winter wipes away the old and allows for spring to feel like renewal...

But people, I am ready for spring.

A Whole New World

I'm back with my Blizzard of 2011 Saga...

So. Tuesday night, after an early release from school due to the catastrophic blizzard warning that began at 3 pm, just in time to really mess with afternoon carpool, I kept looking out the window at the car in the driveway to gauge how much snow had fallen since the start of the warning. Hour after hour, snow churned in the wind, blowing almost sideways, but none seemed to be landing... the car had less than an inch on it. Finally, I went out to shovel before bedtime, anyhow, figuring... if the predictions were correct... I'd want a fresh start in the morning.

I had waited entirely too long. I hadn't accounted for the blowing and drifting that kept the snow from landing on the top of the cars and roofs. I had well over six inches to shovel, as task at which I persisted for an hour before help came out and we made short work of the bottom (and easiest) portion of the driveway. By that time, by the way, the top of the driveway already had about 2 additional inches of snow on it. I couldn't bear the thought of starting over at the top of the driveway, where the wind was coming in from over the roof and then circling down and around, like a perfect surfing wave, blowing snow up in my face. Totally tubular, dude. But this is all my way of telling you that my shoulders were already a bit sore, the skin on my palms a bit red, when I came downstairs Wednesday morning.

School had been cancelled the day before, so we set no alarm. I awoke with the sun around 7, which is quite a bit later than my normal weekday schedule, and went downstairs to find a changed world. I opened the garage door to find a wall of snow with a perfect garage door print in it. Donning all my winter gear -- which does not include snowshoes, because usually they aren't necessary here -- I climbed through the snow barrier and emerged alone into the still-falling snow. No one else in the neighborhood, human or otherwise, had ventured out yet.

The depth of the snow varied from a foot in some places to drifts taller than me in others. Above, our snow gauge, which I believe has numbers up to 2 feet, is covered almost to its top numbers. (Today, just due to compaction, it's already a few inches lower.)

The wind had sculpted some amazing features into the ephemeral white landscape... fins and twists, hills and valleys... it was... is... magical, beautiful, transforming. Clean and sparkling, it was like an empty canvas when I first ventured out. So lovely and inviting.

Until, that is, you realize that you are in charge of shoveling it. Then it becomes somewhat of a pain in the... shoulders, arms, and lower back. I spent an hour digging out one trail from the garage to the street, just the width of a snow shovel . An aisle to freedom. And then, "rest," cried the chief shoveler. And I took a break.

During my rest, I discovered that our heater was not actually producing any heat. Um... Sucky any time, really sucky when no one can get in or out AND the predictions for the following night were sub-zero. Turns out, the pipes to the outside world where the heater gets and releases air were underneath the lovely snow sculpture shown below. My husband put on his snow gear, which does include snowshoes, and proceeded to dig out the 6-foot drift that blocked the pipes. The heater works again, thanks to him, and only at the cost of one screen... a small price to pay for heat in the weather we're having!

Heat functioning, I went back out for shovelfest: round 2, over an hour of excavating, but the problem was, there were no places left to move the snow to. The piles on the sides of my driveway were taller than I, and definitely taller than I could continue to lift snow. I watched as neighbors emerged, everyone digging, stopping to chat and watch the kids and dogs creating a snow playground out of the 15-foot pile that the plows had left in the cul de sac center, and then resuming the toil. Other people pulled out snowblowers after they had made escape routes, but we have always liked the scrape of the shovel, the exercise, the rhythm, the accomplishment of manual snow removal. My parents passed on their old snowblower to us years ago, but it's broken and we never bothered to fix it to a state functionality. (Oops. Lesson learned, sort of.)

At any rate, round 2 got frustrating. Feeling a burn with every load of snow removed, it seemed like I was getting no where. I would be at this all day and never get a swath wide enough to get the car out by school the next day. (At this point, I still believed there would be school the next day, today.) Eventually, help arrived and, once again, the shoveling was finished in somewhat short order. Well, it did take a while to deal with my dad's car, which we sort of got stuck in a snowbank due to our trying to carve the narrowest path possible for it to curve out of, backwards. But it wasn't stuck too badly and we got it out, no harm done, in case he's reading this.

And then, we had a day and a half left to enjoy the winter wonderland. Or to cuddle on the couch with a book.

So this storm? Not a bust. As my young neighbor friend put it as he jumped off the top of the snow structure, (yes, onto the pavement) "BEST SNOW DAY EVER!!!" I find myself hoping more will fall. I like holing up. I like the quiet. I like the admission -- by me and everyone -- that nature has out-powered our technology and our whims and we're changing plans and staying in. I like the adventure...)

I should mention, my husband is not normally the type to allow me to toil away alone for hours on end at something like snow shoveling, but he, like many at our school, caught a bug that sort of knocked him out.
OK, must go drink the last how cocoa before the single work day tomorrow (and then, it's the weekend! Crazy!)

It's Really Winter Now

Below zero temps. Wind chill advisories. BRRRR.

Tracks and Trails

Last week, tracking was pretty good. The show was deep enough for good tracks, not so deep or powdery that the animals kicked snow in their wake and covered their feet features. But I really didn't think today would be that great. See, yesterday, it snowed... which we needed... the snow from the week before was fast a-meltin'... but then the snow turned to rain. It rained most of the afternoon and evening. This meant that the snow was all covered in an ice crust. It also meant that the weather was, not to put too fine a point on it, crappy. I figured, if I was an animal, I would hope I had enough in my cache that I could curl up on my warm den/bed/nest or whatever and not come out. Or, to be more accurate, I am an animal and if I had enough cash I would have stayed in my warm home and waited until it was nicer. Perhaps late March.

Turns out, I was wrong. Either no one had enough put away, or wet cold isn't a deterrent for the rest of them... we say coyote, rabbit, vole, and skunk tracks without leaving the school grounds. Also some tracks that I wasn't too sure of because they had filled in with ice but actually did NOT look like any of the above in terms of stride. And not just one of each, there were places where it looked like there was a canine convention out there. (No human tracks around. Well, previously. Now there are 22 sets if human tracks.) Birds are out, too, but they don't sink into the snow even if they land upon it right now. I guess it was a pretty good day once I got over myself and got out there... There's a lesson in that, somewhere...

Let it Snow!

It's snowing, snowing snowing...

this winter we've heard on the news about snowfalls everywhere... even the south seems to have more snow than us... School is cancelled below the Mason-Dixon line, and our ground is bare! So, we have a covering now. Not enough for a school cancellation (not that much by anyone's standards) but enough to cover the ground, at least.

Happy day for voles... I think of them often on cold, non-snowy days.

Yellow Bellied

The lake has a yellow flag. I've never seen such a thing, and I'm not entirely sure how to interpret it. To fill you in, across the street from school, there is a flagpole. Underneath the American flag, they fly a colored flag that is meant to communicate the status of the ice vis a vis walking safely upon it. The system is simple... red flag = Stop! Danger, ice not thick enough to safely support you! Green flag = Go. For the past 7 years, those were the choices... and now, all of a sudden, yellow. Proceed with caution, if we continue with the obvious traffic signal parallel. So is that... Feel free to walk on it, but we won't be held responsible if you break through and sink into the frigid waters below, succumbing to the calm of cold as you wish you had exercised more caution at the "proceed with caution" color? Only certain parts of the lake are safe? (Which parts?) We were too lazy to go out and measure the thickness, so we're letting you guess? Things are changing so fast... what with the 55 degree day on New Year's Eve followed by a 22 degree day on New Year's day... that we don't even know what's going on with the ice from minute to minute? I don't know... yellow is my favorite color, most of the time, but this is not a place where I want to see yellow.

Personally, I will be staying off the ice unless the following conditions are met:

1. Green flag, for at least a few days.

2. Very cold weather, so there's no water on top of the ice.

Travelling on ice is not something I did as a kid. I mean, we skated. Quite a lot, when I was young. But we skated indoors, generally, and if not, on ice rinks that were not lakes the rest of the year, but fields flooded for that purpose.

The first time I went on a frozen lake, I was already 23, and we were learning to teach frozen lake ecology at Wolf Ridge, where I did a naturalist internship. We walked down to the lake and got to the edge and everyone else followed right on but I stopped at the edge, a statue paralyzed with fear. Yeah, I saw the truck out there. And the little "house" (if you will). But still. Lakes are not meant to be walked upon. I did go out, after a little coaxing, but for the entire (long, cold, Minnesota) winter, I had to swallow my fear when I taught that class, or had to snowshoe across the lake.

The very worst days were the relatively warm, sunny ones, when a layer of water would from on top of the ice. This was terribly disconcerting. The ice was 15 inches thick under the water, and crystal clear with integrity and strength... but no matter. Snowshoes would get clumps of ice frozen to them and if you slipped, you became uncomfortably wet, and... ugh. Or when there was cracking. The ice would sometimes creak and crack. Again, They assured me that 15 inches of ice would hold even with a crack (or 10, or 8 inches). The ice was floating and a crack wouldn't stop that, and the sheet covered the entire body of water so it's not like the two pieces of ice could split even if there was a crack all the way through, which there actually wasn't. But I didn't care. When the ice moans and groans, it's not because it's welcoming your weight.

All that is to say... I am not afraid to go on the ice (anymore) when I know it's safe. But I don't play around with maybes. Shiver. I don't even like imagining it...