Cumulative impact

© harrington

Thanks for stopping by. Welcome. The picture above was taken one year ago today at the very small pond just up the road from our house. Notice the lack of snow cover and the snow and ice melt sitting on top of the ice edges. Today, that same place is covered with several inches of snow and there's not a drop of open water in sight. The weather forecast for the next week or so has local high temperatures in the twenties, nothing above freezing, which means no sap flowing. Do any of you remember the song by the Supremes  You can't hurry love? Substitute "Spring" for love and that pretty well describes how I feel theses days. If there were one thing I might change about Minnesota's seasons, it would be to make her as "successful" with Spring as she usually is with Autumn. Autumns in Minnesota are often beautifully longlasting. Our transition from Autumn to Winter seems less stutter-step (with exceptions for the occasional Halloween blizzard) than Winter into Spring . Autumn is more like a long glide down a smooth, gentle hill. Spring's arrival is more like trying to ski up that hill, full of moguls. And yet, perhaps it's because Spring's changes are so spasmodic--leaf out lasts but days, fiddlehead ferns burst up and uncurl in spasms notably brief. Robins and cranes and herons have their first annual appearance  just one time per. Each Spring phase moving toward Summer lasts little time. Spring is a study in cumulative impact. Once the snow and ice are gone, there's a sense of hurrying toward maturity, like a teenager that can't wait to become "grown-up." Although the calendar will tell us that Spring arrives five days from now with the Equinox, I think we'll be hard pressed to find signs of it by then. Maybe, though, our gangly teenager of this year's Spring will, when it arrives, go through one of those growth spurts that adds inches (or in this case greenery) overnight. Stop back for daily reports containing rants, raves and reflections regarding My Minnesota.