Even though the thermometer says it is already fifty degrees outside, I dress warmly, including gloves and stocking cap. With the rain shell, I am ready for the mornings of the last week; the icy snow and frozen streams of water that will run during the day and twenty degrees. When I step outside with Sidney on the leash, I feel the difference. Although there is no smell of it yet, the possibility of spring is physically present.
The waves of oceanic wind are all around this morning. They are in the hills and the bare winter trees. When I close my eyes, I hear the slow turning air masses in the distance. There are few gusts to be felt and the sound is not close, but the wind has worked with the overnight rains to burn off the ice fields, exposing the mud and grass that will soon begin to move again. I know it is a winter wind, still, by the sound. It will take more than a shift of temperature to change that. Until the first buds appear, the bushes begin to stir, and the grass stands up, the valley will sound much like a curtainless, carpetless room of empty desks or fish bones that is full of this wind.
The old dog walks slowly. The half inch of saturated ground is as tricky as yesterday’s ice sheets. It moves too easily over what is still frozen beneath that. He peers over the side of the road into the fast streams of water coming down from the hills.
Is this the change we say we all have been waiting for? I am not sure. For the old dog, his surviving the winter means that his unsteady ways become even more problematic for this caretaker as he finds he can wander off again. With six horses, two goats, and six cats roaming around the property, his ability to pick up and eat what he finds in the dark corners makes the first five or ten minutes after we come inside a nerve-wracking time. I may not see it going down but too frequently I learn about it while I clean it off the carpet. Euthanasia becomes more and more likely as he regains his roaming room. Ironically, I thought this was going to happen in December. It is one of the ways that the change warmer weather brings can be seen as not so good.
Beautiful description. I like these meditative pieces.
Sidney is a tenacious creature. I know how difficult that reality is.
Spring is stirring, isn’t it? I am not ready for it. Winter seems to slow things down. I want to be snowed in one more time, see the white draped over everything. The wind is not as easy to bear, though, as the season, the accumulation of losses that unbuffered wind summons.
I am longing for spring, my ten-year-old Husky doesn’t relish the winters as he once did. He hid in his house last week when the snow came, and he rises slowly from the cold ground now.