Snow cannot live here

I took my dogs to Edwin Warner Park yesterday for the first time since the Big Snow last week. There was still some slush on the park roads, but on the warm south facing hillside fields there were bare spots. Birds were taking advantage of these. Big flocks of robins sick of eating berries were looking for worms again, and they were joined by a lone wintering hermit thrush and a hardy little phoebe.How I wish the hermit thrush would sing here, but he never does. He, like the veery, saves his songs for the north country and the mountains.Only the wood thrush sings for us, and that will not be until May. Oh yes, and the Swainson's thrush will warble here as well, but only as he passes through.

People had been sliding on this hill after the snow ended. I saw the artifacts, and I was glad. Good parents had been here, risking slick roads to get their children out to play at a pastime as old as Mankind. To get their children outside away from the television and the computer. Not having a sled did not matter. Someone had used the blue top from a big plastic storage container. They left it behind. Someone else- more enterprising and possessing ancient virtues had fashioned a sled from an aluminum paint roller tray, and had attached shoelaces for handles. I thought I'd bringthe paint roller tray sled home with me, but in the end I left it. Maybe parent and child would come back for it, or maybe the park people will find some use for it. It is unlikely we will have enough snow again this winter to sled on. If it snows again at all. Snow is so rare here, and when it comes it cannot stay. Our prevailing winds are from the Gulf, and yesterday I saw how close spring is. The glade cress,a plant of the cedar glades and limestone soils is already bloomimg. Soon the fields at the Steeplechase course will be purple and yellow with the blooms of the henbit and the Nashville mustard. And when they bloom the good parents will come back again to the park. They will bring their children. The children will bring
their kites. Even if I am not there the day the kites fly, I will know they were there. Kites will fly away in the time it takes to tie a shoe. They will go into the trees and stay, and next winter I will see them again, tattered and ready to break loose to join the winter wind.