Tracks in the snow. Big rounded off square ones with toes and claw marks longer than a man’s fingers. Grizzly paw prints. They’re waking up. Maybe they won’t stay up -- maybe after a reconnoiter they’ll go back to snooze a little longer. But don’t hang around to find out -- they wake up really cranky. In town the song sparrow next door is filling the air with arpeggios that sound like love but we are told are meant to defend territory. That is, they are not for the feather-hidden ears of their true love so much as signals for all rivals to keep away. Where did the sweet poetic idea of spring as a love festival come from when it’s really about sex and defense?
This was a cranky-making winter. Here are the facts of this territory, which fall short of the horrific storms of the east. (They were in the Great Falls paper, so they’re Great Falls statistics.):
Cloudy days: 12/1 to 2/21, normally we have 55 and this year we had 21. I don’t believe it.
Clear days: normally 14 but this year 33. The rest were mixed. Hmmmph.
SNOW:
October: 6.9 inches.
November: none
December: 9.5 inches
January: 30 inches.
Entire snow period: usual average 37 inches; this winter 49.4 so far, last year 57.6.
FOG: average 4 days; this winter 12 so far; last year none. The constant fog caused remarkable hoarfrost that became so heavy it brought down power lines or trees that fell into power lines.
COLD: Average 24.9 degrees; This year 21.7; last year 20.4.
NOTABLE STORMS: A big ice storm that hit just before Christmas left the heaviest accumulation ever recorded in Great Falls. It stayed for more than a week. Several times we’ve had record-setting blizzards at the end of April. I was on the road in the one in 1969. They are wet, heavy storms often followed by flooding. Ranchers call them calf-killers. One of my fav Canadian books is “Stilton Seasons: the Diary of a Countryman” by Richard Symons(1975). He says that up in Saskatchewan they know it is spring when the crows come back, but after the dark gangs come winging in, there is generally one more blizzard, called, “the Crow Blizzard.” One more squeeze before winter leaves.
I also recall an idyllic fall last year (When exactly was that? I must look for a better weather website.) and a long cool summer which I enjoyed but which caused unaccustomed problems, like moss on my garage roof. I’m not like many people around here who can reel off the exact climate variations from one year to the next. But I can remember the winters in the Sixties, much more like this one. Weather records on the high northern plains only go back a couple of centuries, if that, so in many ways we know nothing. We must rely on sediments and tree rings. Maybe tribal “counts” kept orally.
Right now the owls are courting -- or at least chanting their eternal question -- from the airport where there are rabbits and grouse across town to the grain elevator where there are usually pigeons. I suppose an occasional kitten goes into the mix since we have plenty of feral cats. I took my usual mid-afternoon tour around the town in the pickiup but only spotted a short string of geese, probably local. No crows, no pigeons, no seagulls. People here don’t like them and will poison them if they can get away with it, even though it’s illegal. To some local minds, federal laws don’t count. Way too early for frogs.
Indoors I’m cautiously de-winterizing. The dark (rust, emerald, gold) Roman striped drapes are down, replaced by cream and pink one-inch stripes. Bold red stripes now on the sofa. Blue and white ticking on the wicker chair. I’m pondering my reading chair -- will probably go to pink roses on cream. That’s what’s on the hassock. The quilt over my bedroom window, the mover’s packing pad over the back door, and the plastic painter’s dropcloth covering the coldest bathroom wall are down now. Other measures are pending. Should I start some seeds on the window sill? Can I afford a quart of paint? My next door neighbors must have gotten a good tax rebate: I see new furniture come in and old furniture go out. The neighbors across the street are planning to move to a new house in the country. There a little frisson, a ferment, all across the town.
Sunshine is sluicing through the house. Less conveniently, moonlight is also flooding in, making the cats wakeful and shining in my own face at 3AM. Squibbie comes to lean on my ear and purr like a locomotive in hopes of persuading me to open the garage door. A cat flap in the kitchen lets her get into the garage. But if I open the garage, the cat traffic is likely to come in rather than go out which leads to cat war on the kitchen floor. Screaming death threats and tufts of fur. The Squib will have to settle for cat food. Which means Crackers wants some, too, so I might as well check my email. I’m tempted to put on clothes and go walk in the moonlight, but that’s not fair when the cats have to stay in. The newspaper lady will soon be at work. The nursing assistant will soon be heading out for the county seat hospital.
Lately the media people have been talking about the difference between “weather” and “climate” and I even saw a brief discussion of the geological consequences of atmospheric meterological force changes, things like the weight of snow on the land, the disappearance of glaciers, penetration of ground water deep into the continents which are really only immense rafts floating on a molten sea. Fire, mud, eruptions (Old Perpetual geyser in Oregon has stopped erupting) and, of course, those terrifying earthquakes -- all uncontrollable, unpredictable, deadly and expensive, will be sending some people into frenzies of Chicken Little panic.
To mark gradually increasing daily highs by hanging different curtains is a small thing, but I control it. It is reassuring to stand at the ironing board over fabrics I haven’t seen for a while, as though they were returning flowers and birds.
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