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I Love It Here!Sauk Centre This Season |
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Spring
But it isn't so. Bridging the gap between winter and summer, spring in central Minnesota combines the unpleasant qualities of both. It is the time when winter melts. Winter winds take dust and dirt, depositing them on the snow. Usually, more snow falls and the surface is sparking white again. But the dirt is still there. More than three decades ago, people started calling this combination of snow and dirt "snirt:" snow and dirt. We can accumulate a lot of snirt after a snowy winter. When temperatures rise above freezing, the snirt turns to snud. If it melts fast enough, we get slud. (That's snow and mud, and snow and liquid mud, respectively: and revoltingly.) We also get water. Cold water. Cold water that runs over pavement and freezes overnight. The ice that results is often a perfect, smooth, skating-rink-slick surface: cleverly disguised as a damp sidewalk or street. The grass, where it can be seen in gaps between snow banks or snirt-topped snow banks or snud-topped snirt banks, is a pale tannish-brown. In some spots, patches of bare dirt reveal where over-achieving snow plows removed snow, grass, and soil. Then there are the trees, bending over this desolate and soggy scene with the charm of discarded oven-cleaning brushes. And, in the branches, birds. Their chirps, warbles and squawks remind me that, if I wait long enough, the snud will rejoin the soil, grass will turn green, and trees will sprout leaves. No matter how unlikely it may seem at the time, summer will come. |
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Text is copyright © Brian H. Gill 2002 |
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This page last updated: December 19, 2010
