It was just two weeks ago that winter seemed like a permanent and manageable state of being.  In truth, this has been a mild Wisconsin winter, with temperatures rarely dipping below 0F, and I’ve felt proud of myself for not going completely soft after a season in Georgia.  Still, I hadn’t seen bare ground since early November.  For months, the sleeping earth has been dreaming dreams of expansive ice-crystals and becoming more porous, all in anticipation of Spring.

Oh, boy, and did Spring announce herself yesterday.  Something about the quality of air–cool, crisp, wet and a midwestern sort of balmy in the mid-20s–set my seasonal gears going.  The light was in that upper register, bright and clear, and skimming just above everyone’s heads.  Light touches everywhere, small plates of delight.

The ritual (and slow) plowing of streets in this small town has created, on some corners, 5-foot-high fortified walls of crunchy, chunky, packed snow.   It has been hard to imagine this natural, geologic pavement ever disappearing.  This stuff could never just melt. No, it is stratified; it is sedimentary.  You could find dinosaurs and arrowheads in the eternity of snow on the side of the road.

Except.

Yesterday it started to melt.  I saw bare ground.  Spring is coming, down whatever circuitous path she unwinds to her arrival.