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| My Ski Trail, March 1st |
Two weeks ago, we wrote off winter. It never showed after a brief tease around Thanksgiving. After that, we transitioned from a late wet autumn-like weather directly into a mild damp spring, complete with bare roads and mossy forest walks on trails of ice or bare ground. The lake was a skating rink or a watery slush pond, depending on the temperature and amount of rain. The weather apps were rife with optimism, forecasting snow when the temperature was breaking forty. We abandoned hope of snow like it was a car with flat tires. The winter has been anything but normal with little snow and lots of warm temperatures with rain and more rain, but this mid-March gift of snow is so typical that I predicted it two weeks ago. March is always rich in sun, warm temperatures, and snow. This is a bold statement, but I've been in Seward since 1978, and I have a pretty good memory. Usually the winter transpires as follows: November: cold and windy with some snow. December is colder and a little wind and snow until about Christmas. Christmas through the New Year. Warm and wet. January: warm and rainy mixed with cold and maybe some snow. February: cold and some snow, usually a warmup for a few days during the month. March: sun, snow, and warmer, even with some days that make one think of spring.  |
| March 13 |
I coached cross country skiing for a lot of years, twenty or more, and the middle school season usually started after the first of the year --see above-- and we'd we'd run the hallways to get in shape and cry for snow. The season would end about the first or second weekend of March, when we usually had plenty of snow and more coming. Year after year I begged for a change of the ski season to a couple weeks later to no avail. Here we are again, mid-March, with snow falling generously, and the snow plow rigs fired up to try and make a truck payment with what's left of the season. The layering of several inches of snow not only changes the whole look of our little place on the lake; it also changes the whole rhythm or perception of the season and what we should be doing in it. In a scant twenty-four hours, our "let's get ready for breakup" conversations turned to "Where's-my-ski-boots talk?" and "should-I-groom-now-or-wait-for-more-snow? discussions.
On March 13, I started this writing while out the window at snow falling into the willows along the lake. The next day, I was skiing on the lake, and several times since then. I grooomed the four-and-a-half mile trail around the lake perimeter for the first time in twelve months. A week before, I was looking at bare ground and talking about yard maintenance. Here I am, on the sixteenth of March, watching people ski past my house as wisps of snow fall. But in the same window pane, I recognize buds forming on the willows. Happy Saint Patrick's Day. Ski while you can, but don't put the rake away, either. Spring is coming.
