Photo: Garry Armstrong
It was snowing. Pretty hard. We could get 8 or 10 inches before the day was out.
It won’t last.
It’ll sit on the ground for a couple of days until the bitterly cold weather goes away. After that, maybe another day, then whoosh, gone. Spring snows don’t hang around and become part of the furniture. Not like January snows do.
Photo: Garry Armstrong
It was pretty odd this morning, though. Shows you how I’ve stopped watching news even when it’s something I should know.
I got up at around 5. Looked out the window and said WTF? I shook my aging gray head, and went back to bed. An hour later I got up again. I had that uneasy feeling of a household with dogs and snow falling. It’s not that the dogs don’t like snow, but they really adore the sofa. Snow is cold. Snow is wet. The sofa is warm and dry.
I threw the dogs out. This involves a running battle with Bonnie who goes down one single step at a time. Looks at me, pleadingly.
“GO OUT!” I say again, and down she goes … one more step. Another look. We do this for all six steps, and then — at the doggy door — she gives me a final, haunted look. I persist. She goes out and the two dogs have a rollicking good time because they don’t really mind snow. Once they are outside, it’s just fun and games in the fluff. The whole tortured trip down the stairs is a way of playing mind games with us.
That was when I thought about The Car. We had slipped back into parking it down next to the house. The normal thing to do, unless snow and ice are expected. So, on a sort of whim, I turned on the computer. Big note from the Boston Globe (to which we subscribe, thank you) that it’s beautiful “up here” — meaning Boston — but if you live anywhere below the Pike (Route 90) or anywhere else down south, it’s a whole other story.”
Photo: Garry Armstrong
For such a little state, Massachusetts has a busy weather department. Down here, it was snowing and would keep snowing until late in the day. Maybe collecting as much as 10 inches. And, the story continued “With bitterly cold weather coming in tonight …”
I sighed. Shook Garry. Asked him where he left the car. “Down by the garage,” he said. Note that the garage isn’t a garage. It’s a shop and a small storage room, so the car lives in the driveway. I told him it was snowing and I hated to bother him, but …
He got up. Put on the pants, boots, vest, coat, gloves — and moved the car to the top by the road. We should have paid more attention to the weather last night — I’m sure they mentioned this — but the news is depressing. We listen to as much of it as we can handle, then move on to other things. Mostly murder mysteries. I decided we were NOT getting snow. Period.
We got snow. It will be gone in a couple of days. The earth is warm from the past few weeks of almost summer weather.
There will be a lot of chilly, wet spring days when it appears nothing is happening at all, but the buds will grow fat. A day will come, maybe around the end of April or early in May. Suddenly, it will be GLORIOUS AND BEAUTIFUL. Everything will burst into flower and the trees will go from bare branches to full leaf between late morning and early afternoon.
That’s when the caterpillars will show up.
I wrote this before the prediction came up that next week will be just as bad as this one. Worse, actually. Nonetheless, when all is said and done … we’ll still have caterpillars eating the trees.
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