The melting of the snow offers a reverse review of the winter, like scrolling slowly down through a blog — a gray & granular roll-call of storms, dotted with patches of yellow. The snow gets dirtier & dirtier until the point where the ground starts to appear, when it looks white again by contrast. Even before the first wild onions, the bare brown earth is infinitely more complex than anything you can cover it with. I mean, where did these sticks come from all over the yard? Who threw them? The honeybees start flying before the last snow melts, drinking from sapsucker wells & other fresh wounds. Soon only the white buildings will remind us of winter’s blankness — tombs for the Asian ladybug beetles that infiltrated them by the thousands last Fall, thinking they were cool chalk cliffs, & died of thirst. The south-facing windows have been stained with the grime of beetle feet. Vacuum cleaners howl. Outside, three doves try to out-mourn each other, as if this disreputable yard were another Jerusalem.
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Don’t forget to visit qarrtsiluni, where the first posts for our Nature in the Cracks issue are beginning to appear.
wow, can I really leave a comment?
om mani padme hung
Given how sensuously you can blog deep winter, it’s refreshing to hear that you still consider winter “blank.”
dale – Yep, comments and chants both are back in season!
Jarrett – Well, you know, I’m told that some men (not me, necessarily) find a blank stare sensuous…
Congratulations on escaping the Valley of BSOD! ;-)
Down south in VA, there’s been little snow, and a significant amount of green even in the “depths” of winter. But I just found wild garlic shoots growing out of my local hiking trail!
. . . and the voice of the commenters is heard in our land!
We’ve been getting dust from China over hear, lots of it. Often wake up to a yellow sky and drying laundry turned brown. Even with the windows closed I have to sweep and vacuum the floor every day. The dust comes from the Gobi desert and is called “Kosa” in Japan. It’s always been here, but has been getting much worse lately and kills many people every year. Korea had to close down for a day last week to protect people. Hasn’t really felt much like winter this year.
With the comment blackout solved , this morning a little question mark appeared in the yellow triangular cartouche for Via Negativa so I expected trouble, but it seems ok. Is it?
David – Well, fingers crossed on that escape! Those Russian hackers are pretty smart.
miguel – And some of that blows clear across the Pacific, too, I hear. But I didn’t realize how grim it was in Japan. Damn.
Allan – Not to worry. That’s my new favicon, which I made in Photoshop by manipulating Firefox’s exclamation-point symbol. My cousin tells me that some browsers are quite aggressive in caching favicons, so most IE users are probably still seeing the old favicon (which was a “falling rocks ahead” warning sign – a legacy from my original Blogspot blog, where a larger and more legible version of the sign was displayed at the top of the header).
Gorgeous.
You actually made me feel a little sorry for those stinky ladybugs.