I think for the most part that spring has finally arrived where we live. The past two weeks have heralded temperatures in the 50’s with drops into the teens at night. It’s a perfect scenario to create quick running sap from any nearby maple trees making our area syrup producers happy. Our snow has been completely eliminated, but the cold temperatures at night have slowed down the run-off to avoid flooding in most places. All in all it would have to be considered an ideal spring thaw and a rare one to have all the snow completely eliminated before the first of April. While I remember birthdays from childhood that were warm enough for bike rides and jump rope I can’t seem to recall any birthdays that warm since I was in high school. I am definitely enjoying the return to what I consider to be ‘normal’ weather patterns and I wonder what happened to our global warming?
The kids have been enjoying the weather as well. The first few days were spent donning galoshes and splashing in puddles. Now that the puddles have finally dried up they’ve been enjoying wearing lightweight fleece jackets and sneakers when they play. Max has been happy to have the return of his baseball cap to his head rather than his winter touque. Yesterday we spent most of the day outside, raking the INCREDIBLE amount of pine needles and pine cones that are covering our yard from the many wind storms we’ve had this year. The kids this year were finally old enough to be helpful. I purchased each kid work gloves and Max happily helped me rake, dragged sticks onto his sled and dumped them into the woods for me. Catherine took a bucket and collected pine cones and spread them throughout the woods as well. I was able to clean out the flower beds and even saw new growth from the perennials I planted poking up through the earth.
Today though seems to almost taunt our hard work yesterday with a dark, black sky, lightly falling snow, and the occasional pierce of bright orange sunshine through the clouds. It almost seems like winter and spring are still battling it out, but I still think spring is going to be the victor.