Spring? Maybe?

Even though it snowed today and is likely to snow again later this week, for the past several days the ratio of accumulated snow to melted snow has tipped distinctly towards the melted end.

I noticed this first when I was driving home from work the other day. One of the roads I take always has some kind of construction happening, either on the road or right next to it, and this time as I drove by I saw what looked like misshapen concrete blobs lining the gutter, as if waiting to be installed in some horrible bit of modern landscaping. “Those are the ugliest rocks I’ve ever seen,” I thought. A moment later I realized that they weren’t rocks at all; they were the remnants of snowdrifts, covered in muck spewed from weeks of passing cars. I kept my eyes peeled for more as I continued the drive, and they were all over: piles of shrunken snowflakes, every color of dirt, lining the gutters, piled up beside driveways and mailboxes, and miserably seeping black tendrils of water across parking lots.

You see, the snow here isn’t like snow in New Mexico. It doesn’t sneak in on weekends and then evaporate magically before the face of a new day’s sun. Utah snow rolls in, stern and inexorable, promptly digging in its trenches and gearing up for an entire season of squatting. It clings in place long after its beautiful white face is ruined by footsteps and grime. Shovel it, stomp paths through it, it doesn’t care—you aren’t warm enough to melt it all away, and reinforcements are coming. Even now, when it’s hardly distinguishable as snow at all, it lives on; limping, hunchbacked, shriveled, and filthy. But it’s dying, slowly but surely now, as February wanes, and beneath it something is emerging that I hadn’t thought beautiful before: mud.

Yes, mud. There’s something wonderfully alive about it, even if it’s not yet freckled with tiny green leaflets. I can almost see a green tinge on the mountains where the snow has receded. Perhaps it’s an anticipatory illusion, but I just know those plants are there, right under the surface, just waiting for a little more encouragement to show themselves to the waking world. I can almost hear them breathing.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about this the past couple days as I’ve been lying here in my bed, sick with a coldish/fluish/yuckish thing. I won’t be sick forever, and it won’t be winter forever. The plants in my room are starting to perk up. Aslan must be on the move again.

Maybe there will be spring this year after all.