THE BIG MELT OFF

So I woke up this morning to another new layer of snow, the few inches that had fallen through the night leaving my world with a white sugar frosting making the mountains and fences and barriers of snow seem even bigger, because they were.

But as I leaned on my shovel during a break, before my teenager showed up from his mother's and finished shoveling the sidewalks, and before the sun even broke through, there was a different feel in the air. I could actually hear a bird singing somewhere nearby.

It felt like a touch of Spring was in the air, and that despite the fact that the wet spots where I shoveled this morning and the icicles hanging from the roof had begun to drop moisture instead of shards, turned so icy my friend Bill took a spill on his way out (I hadn't thrown down the salt yet)...despite that, the big melt is on its way. Over the next few days we're in for a lot of melted snow creating creeks and rivers on the sidewalks and streets, the only places there isn't snow these days, at least where it's been totally cleared.

It's like that early silent movie with, was it Mary Pickford, trying to cross the frozen river as it begins to thaw and the ice to break up, or when I was a kid and there was snow on the ground from Christmas to Valentine's Day, at least, so when the first little feeling of Spring arrived it felt life changing, the excitement of anticipation building up.

It will probably take several days of melting snow before any actual earth is spotted beneath the several feet that's out there now, and weeks of consistently above freezing temperature to see all the snow disappear. But what a wonderfully natural transition for the kids who've never experienced it to now know firsthand. Though we know from recent years' catastrophic climate events, that beyond this week's forecast anything could still happen...