frosty

I was shocked to notice there was snow on the ground this morning. Not a lot of it. Mostly the leftover stuff that the wind swirled into the places where the wind wouldn’t be able to blow it out into the open again. And there was snow blown into long, curlicued shapes on the thin skin of ice that formed on the Yahara River.

I didn’t notice any other snow on the way to work, and forgot about it completely until I went for a walk during my lunch break. I walked across the open field of the park behind the office building and notice there was still quite a bit more snow in the grass that I would’ve thought there might be at noon on a sunny day, even thought it was well below freezing and the ground was hard as rock.

This shouldn’t shock me. We live in Wisconsin. I was born here and grew up in Wisconsin and Upper Michigan, where snow is more than a seasonal effect, it’s practically a landscape, like hills and valleys, lakes and rivers, ice and snow. Nobody who lived through the winters in Marquette, Michigan, could possibly conceive of a world without snowbanks up to your eyeballs any more than someone from Florida could conceive of a world without an ocean.

Even so, I was still a tad bit upset there is finally snow on the round, where it will stay until February, possibly March. There is no denying it any longer. We will be bundled up for many months.