Now it looks like this.
The snow actually started on Wednesday night and continued all through Thursday. I don’t worry too much about April snow because I know it can’t last too long but it’s still a bit annoying, especially since this snow was not pretty. In addition to being very wet and heavy, it was ugly. A fresh blanket of snow is usually gorgeous but Thursday morning, everyone noticed something different in this particular blanket: It was brown. Not dark brown but a very light golden brown, like white bread that had just begun to toast. Apparently, the high wind kicked up a dust storm in Texas and carried it right up the continent, mixing tons of fine sand into the snowstorm as it fell all over the upper Midwest. So our fresh snowfall was streaked with dirt.
Yuck.
Jay and I walked around Lake Harriet on Thursday, between flurries. It’s barely cold enough for this precipitation to remain snow but the sun is high enough in the sky for the lakes to be open water, as well as the Creek, which has been running high and fast for at least a week.
Oh, last Saturday I took Xena and Babalouie for a walk down to the creek. Two blocks from my house, there’s a large open park along the creek with enough space to play softball, some tennis courts and two bridges which are perfect for Pooh Sticks.
For the illiterates out there, Pooh Sticks is a game first described in The House at Pooh Corner, one of the greatest children’s books ever written. If you have kids, go buy the Winnie the Pooh books today and read them aloud. You’ll be grateful you did. If you don’t have kids, do it for yourself. What makes these books great is that they work on every level: the stories are wonderful for kids and hilarious for adults. I still can’t read about Eeyore’s birthday without laughing until I cry.
I taught my grandkids to play Pooh Sticks. We dropped small sticks off the bridge and raced to see whose rocketed out the other side a few times. We had just started playing when a couple walked over the bridge and the gal said “Playing Pooh Sticks, I see.” Up until that moment, I think the kids suspected that I’d made the game up. Validation!
Xena and Babalouie really got into it and in no time were rooting through the underbrush looking for bigger and bigger sticks to hurl. This made sense, since the snowmelt has made the water so high and deep; small sticks were harder to keep an eye on. Being competitive by nature, in no time at all, the two of them were searching out not just sticks but logs to fling into the creek. Pretty soon Xena was hauling entire limbs out of the underbrush to drop off the bridge…I had to put a stop to that, telling them that we didn’t need to throw all of nature’s debris into the water. Still, seeing her dragging what looked like an entire dead shrub toward the bridge was one of the highpoints of the day!
They spent the night with me while Megan had a nice and necessary day of peace and quiet and Ty went down to USBank Stadium for the Final Four. Jay, Zack and Ty all got to see the games and had a great time. The kids and I had fun too: Katie and the twins joined us for dinner. The kids had a terrific time chasing each other around the house while screaming. When I had had enough of that, I turned on the Mickey Mouse Club and they all calmed down. The last hour of the party was spent with the four of them piled into Jay’s recliner together, mesmerized by Disney magic.
Monday, Jay and Ty were back downtown for the Championship game. I was watching Father Brown on the porch when they came running in the back door.
“Who won?” I called out.
“It’s in over time!” one of them answered.
“Why are you home?” I asked.
“76,000 people!” Jay answered.
They had left after the third quarter to avoid getting stuck downtown. Jay’s favorite moment of the entire year is not when the ball drops at midnight or when the grandkids lay eyes on the tree Christmas morning but when Luther Vandross sings “One Shining Moment” to highlights of the entire tournament. No way was he going to miss it for the sake of seeing a quarter of basketball live.
Madness.
Hard to believe that was all less than a week ago. Since then, we had a day of real spring and then winter reasserted itself, like the Balrog’s whip reaching up out of the abyss of Khazad-dum to drag us back down into death and despair. Like Gandalf, we will fight, win and re-emerge into springtime.
Due to the high wind, on Thursday we saw that the undergrowth along the south side of the lake was all covered in ice, due to spray from the water freezing solid as it was blown up into the shrubbery. It sounded like wind chimes as the north wind continued to batter at it. We saw a bald eagle perched high in a tree on the East side of the lake. As we watched, it spread it’s huge wings, fell out of the tree, caught the wind and soared off back towards the river where it probably lives.
We walked again on Friday. We didn’t see another eagle but in addition to the coots, ducks and geese, we saw two loons and one, lonely swan. I’ve never seen a swan on Lake Harriet before. Jay spied it before I did. He said “there’s something big and white floating right off the beach over there!” We had to get closer before we could positively identify it. It was sitting serenely off the beach on the East side of the lake, about thirty feet from shore, where a flock of terrified geese refused to go anywhere near it. Geese are fairly large but this thing was twice their size. It kept honking and muttering to itself like a grumpy old man on his front porch.
We got another snowfall on top of that disgusting brown stuff, so at least its pretty again. Well, as pretty as the slushy, muddy mess of early spring can be.
Next week is Easter Sunday. Winter will be vanquished eventually! It always is.