And another thing...

It snowed again today.

It's hard to believe that it was just this past Monday when I woke up to a heavy, wet snow that made my pre-dawn commute seriously dangerous, and was mostly melted before sunset. Today's snow seemed more like a sort of prank: At first it came down so fine and so fast that it looked like visual static. After an hour or so it turned into huge, fluffy flakes that quickly produced an accumulation of an inch or more on surfaces - at least temporarily. I didn't get to see this snow before it evaporated, but I'm willing to bet that any accumulation had a spongy, foam-like texture.

This isn't the worst Winter we've had recently. Some past Winters have been quite warm. The 2015/2016 and 2016/2017 seasons seemed to concentrate their cold and snow into a single storm. Other Winters were much more brutal, freezing pipes and tearing up roads and killing winter-hardy perennials and possibly killing vast numbers of songbirds. Some were like the cool kids with muscle cars who hung around their high school parking lots the year after their graduation, when everybody else had gone off to work or college. Some, as writer Francesco Marciuliano put it, acted like someone owed them money.

This Winter is similar to, but different from, an image Douglas Adams used to describe thunder from a violent thunderstorm that continues to rumble after the storm has moved on, like someone continuing to grumble "...and another thing..." after an argument is over. This Winter is more like someone who has decisively lost an argument and has left the room, but keeps returning to try to make another feeble point, only to slink off again and again. Each new storm - and there may be more on the way soon - melts and evaporates more quickly than the last.

Winter officially ended more than two weeks ago. Spring is here. The crocuses and daffodils have bloomed, the irises are on their way. Soon Winter will leave for good, and we will be able to move on,