Spring is Here!

My snowshoes were stuck vertical in the snow and so much snow melted that they fell over.

The melting snow reveals a lot. Like pumpkins from last year's Fall Festival. And dog poop too!

As the snow melts on metal roofs, it slides in a big sheet and sometimes hangs over quite far.

Two days ago our roof was covered with snow and foot tall ice dams. Today, almost gone!

Bags of popcorn hanging in the greenhouse. Yesterday I had 100% pop from the ear I tried in the air popper.

At least it feels like Spring is here. If you had asked me two days ago when winter would end, I would have said probably mid-April. There was so much snow and it felt so cold, that I would not have been able to conceive of a non-winter day. Today if you asked me, I’d have to say the snow could all be gone by next week. What a difference. The entire landscape has changed in a few short hours. It felt like that moment in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia where the snow melts all at once.

I think more melting happened today than in all of the rest of the winter combined. The hard-packed snow paths that criss-cross the farmstead have all changed consistency and we are now breaking through soft mush. If we wanted to make snowballs, the snow has become perfect packing snow. The snow that has been on top of the greenhouse all winter magically went away. The guinea fowl, which have spent the bulk of the winter within 50 feet of the chicken coop, were on the road today, yakking away. For the first time in months, I walked outside without a winter hat on.

Yesterday I spent a couple hours using boiling hot water to carve channels in the ice dams on the farmhouse roof. Today all the snow that melted on the roof had an exit path and instead of entering the house, it came off in a steady stream. So much snow melted off the roof that huge areas are visible and dry now and the ice dams of yesterday are half as big. Victory is sweet.

By Andy