Does winter's nadir equal spring's cusp?

The local snowmobile trails along the roads and in the ditches are showing more and longer patches of mud. Is their season coming to an end for the year? In a little more than a week, ice houses will have to be off Minnesota lakes in the southern two-thirds of the state. Last year's (2020) fishing licenses expire on February 28. Turkey hunting licenses go on sale March 1. All these are signs that winter will soon become spring, but here in the North Country that trip is often made with a stutter step that sometimes seems to take us "back" into winter for a few days.

purple martin house in Spring snowstorm

Photo by J. Harrington

March 1 a couple of years ago looked like the picture above. That's a martin house (sans martins) with all the snow on the roof. We've probably several weeks to a month (or more) to go until we enter this year's mud season. That's not been the same ever since the  township paved our gravel road a few years ago. We still have very mixed feelings about that little element of "progress."

Somewhere along the way it's become a bit of a tradition to get the Better Half a new fishing license as a birthday present. We'll have a chat with her soon and see if it's possible to pencil in a trip sometime early next month. We'll not announce when because that's all too often an invitation to the snow gods to deliver a blizzard and we certainly can do without such, especially as we try to shake ourselves loose from winter's accumulated crust and cruft.

Why Is the Color of Snow?

Brenda Shaughnessy - 1970-

Let's ask a poet with no way of knowing.
Someone who can give us an answer,
another duplicity to help double the world.

What kind of poetry is all question, anyway?
Each question leads to an iceburn,
a snownova, a single bed spinning in space.

Poet, Decide! I am lonely with questions.
What is snow? What isn't?
Do you see how it is for me.

Melt yourself to make yourself more clear
for the next observer.
I could barely see you anyway.

A blizzard I understand better,
the secrets of many revealed as one,
becoming another on my only head.

It's true that snow takes on gold from sunset
and red from rearlights. But that's occasional.
What is constant is white,

or is that only sight, a reflection of eyewhites
and light? Because snow reflects only itself,
self upon self upon self,

is a blanket used for smothering, for sleeping.
For not seeing the naked, flawed body.
Concealing it from the lover curious, ever curious!

Who won't stop looking.
White for privacy.
Millions of privacies to bless us with snow.

Don't we melt it?
Aren't we human dark with sugar hot to melt it?
Anyway, the question—

if a dream is a construction then what
is not a construction? If a bank of snow
is an obstruction, then what is not a bank of snow?

A winter vault of valuable crystals
convertible for use only by a zen
sun laughing at us.

Oh Materialists! Thinking matter matters.
If we dream of snow, of banks and blankets
to keep our treasure safe forever,

what world is made, that made us that we keep
making and making to replace the dreaming at last.
To stop the terrible dreaming.

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