Winter is worn out. I walked to the creek yesterday and saw signs everywhere of the season’s last gasp. The sledding hill was empty, its snowpack well-trodden and soggy from the morning rain, cracked sleds abandoned near the bottom. The frozen creek was like a junkyard full of jagged ice chunks and broken branches, naked ice unprotected by its usual blanket of snow now pockmarked and scarred.
We romanticize signs of spring – grass turning green, birds singing, the smell of a warming breeze – but this scene was more like the field after a battle. It looked as if winter finally gave up the ghost but, then, I didn’t actually see it wave the white flag.