Does a "normal" band of brown = a "normal" MN Winter? #phenology

We're a few days late posting this. Last week we discovered the season's first wooly bear caterpillar. It's been hanging around on the inside of the screens on the back patio. The photo is less than ideal because, in the afternoon, when we took the picture, the sun was shining and backlit the fuzzies more than our cell phone camera could comfortably handle. It looks to us as though the brown band is about "normal," whatever that means. After about half a lifetime here, we're not convinced there is such a thing as a normal Winter in Minnesota.

should we expect a "normal" Winter?

Photo by J. Harrington

Last year we found a wooly bear late in the season and, carefully following directions, put it in a jar with food and earth to watch it hatch come this Spring. The effort failed. The caterpillar never made it to the cocoon stage. As some form of compensation, we'll do a catch and release on the caterpillar that is still trying to find its way out of the screens. We can free it next to the area where we left the tiny frog, about the size of the nail on our little finger, that left onto SiSi's head when we let her out to do some business. Cutest darn frog we've ever seen. Sorry we couldn't get a picture.

A Caterpillar on the Desk

by Robert Bly

           Lifting my coffee cup, I notice a caterpillar crawling over my sheet of ten-cent airmail stamps. The head is black as a Chinese box. Nine soft accordions follow it around, with a waving motion, like a flabby mountain. Skinny brushes used to clean pop bottles rise from some of its shoulders. As I pick up the sheet of stamps, the caterpillar advances around and around the edge, and I see his feet: three pairs under the head, four spongelike pairs under the middle body, and two final pairs at the tip, pink as a puppy's hind legs. As he walks, he rears, six pairs of legs off the stamp, waving around the air! One of the sponge pairs, and the last two tail pairs, the reserve feet, hold on anxiously. It is the first of September. The leaf shadows are less ferocious on the notebook cover. A man accepts his failures more easily-or perhaps summer's insanity is gone? A man notices ordinary earth, scorned in July, with affection, as he settles down to his daily work, to use stamps.

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