Talk to people about this winter’s weather, and they say it’s been a long one, a hard one, with a March that clung to the cold with chilly, determined fingers. Around here, we’re all feeling long suffering, put upon, quite saintlike, really. We agree that never, never, never has a winter lasted so far into spring.
Apparently, we have short memories as this post from April 8, 2009 shows. A day earlier, seven inches of wet, heavy snow fell. Good thing I blogged about it, because the memory is completely gone. As the post below shows, this spring’s weather (minus the Mapleton tornado and egg-sized hail in NW Iowa) has been pretty much par for the course.
Sunshine Song
Thirty-two degrees and a slight breeze makes for a chilly morning, so I waited to walk until the sun was bright enough warm my back and seriously damage the remaining snow cover and, hopefully, warm my back. This April day I look ready for Christmas, stuffed into my down-filled coat, a scarf tied around my neck and over my hat, thick gloves covering my hands.
The sun is April strong, but this morning I doubted it’s power until a cardinal’s song lifted my eyes from the cold road beneath my feet. I searched the treetops and found him perched near the top of a neighbor’s tall tree, on the crest of the hill. Sunlight bounced off the small bird’s feathers, and he glowed, dazzling bright against the spring sky.
The little bird sang, oblivious of the cold, warmly dressed in his down-filled coat and pointy feathered hat. Had he been singing since sunrise? Or did he wait until he could serenade the pitiable, earthbound humans walking on his road? Whatever his reason for being there, the glow of his feathers against the intense blue sky and the buds swelling on the branches gave me what I needed – beauty beyond description and patience to wait for the warmer days ahead.
