Merrimac Meltdown, Part 2

Listen to the news today, and you probably heard something about spring arriving at 12-something a.m. The TV newspeople I watched and heard seemed to delight in mentioning not only that spring had arrived, but that it had done so during the first hour of the day. Hark! The sun has finally crossed the equator and is headed back to our hemisphere...which, if you think about it, would be a whole lot more meaningful if the sun was actually in the sky when it happened. Then we could have stepped outside and said, "Wait for it, wait for it, wait...there! It's crossed the equator! Spring, here we come!" On cue, birds would sing and flowers would burst forth from the ground.

Right: Instead, we are under a winter storm watch.

Let's look back a few days. Here's how our crusty, unsightly, unwelcome snow pile was faring last Tuesday, after a day of burning sun and temperatures in the high 40s:

Here's a view of the ugly glacier along the street. Still significant snow, but the banks are waning:

By now, the poor damaged shrub - the calling card of the Plow Man - had emerged. You can see various shurb-parts scattered across the snow.

Alas, poor wounded shurb...will he survive the landscaper's scrutiny?

I felt lousy on Tuesday, and spent the following day in bed. Since then, practically everyone I've called throughout the last few work days is either sick, getting sick, or getting over being sick. Stuffy nose, sore throat, cough, flu, you name it. A week later, I'm still working on blowing my sinuses clear.

Thursday was even warmer than Tuesday. It was 50 degrees out when I snapped this:

Look - grass! And our first artifact of emergent trash, on the boulevard along the sidewalk:

Then our melting documentation experiment goes awry. My wife decided my dad's suggestion of using snow to clean the garage floor was a brilliant idea. On Saturday, she scooped a bunch out of the pile, dumped it on the concrete, and used it to drag the accumulated road filth from the garage floor. Now, it's all over the driveway, where we'll undoubtedly track it back in. I will concede the floor is clean.

At any rate, because of this disturbation, we'll never now just how fast the Merrimac Range would have melted. Then on Monday, as one person remarked, winter called in reinforcements:

The snow was the kind that's almost more water than white, the kind that does goes splish, splosh, slip, slop when you walk through and makes a mess of your pants. By the next day, it had melted, and the sunny weather returned.

Tonight, we're under a winter storm watch again, with a couple more inches of white slush expected by morning. And the forecast for Easter is a pathetic high of 37 degrees with flurries. Fortunately for those of us who live in these uncooperative northern climes, Easter won't come this early again for some 200-plus years.