THE MARCH OF MUD

It almost looks like it's true - the squeaky wheel does get the grease!  Complain, and someone will do something about it!  My last post was about snow, snow, snow and here I am a week later talking about mud.

We have been enjoying a week's worth of above zero temperatures.  The days have been so warm that the snow that Glen couldn't get to on the roof has been avalanching down onto the deck in sections as the metal roofing warms up enough to let it slide.  The first couple times it happened it freaked the dog right out, but he seems to have it figured out now.  It's not all that unusual to have a brief February thaw, but this one is exceptional - it's been more than a week long and it doesn't even freeze over night.  I tell you, it's weird to lay in bed in the middle of a winter night and listen to the eaves trough running water.

Although there has been a lot of melting going on the snow pack doesn't really look to have shrunk much.  True, the roads are visible, but the ditches are still full.  The ridges left by the snow plows aren't as high as they were last week, but they are still plenty high enough to catch drifting snow should we get some more.  The one good thing about the snow that's left - it is more like solid ice, the wind won't be moving it again.  The long range weather says that we may get some more the first week of March, but that's a long way off and let's hope they are wrong.

Meanwhile I get to deal with pre-spring spring.  March's calling card - mud - has taken over the porch. 

I tell myself, as I stand at the doorway and observe the mess, that it's not as bad as it used to be.  I now only have a husband and a dog to deal with.  There was a time when there were four kids plus the man and at least one dog ... sometimes even a cat ... with all their footprints everywhere and mud splatter up the walls because every one knows it's easier to kick boots off than it is to calmly remove them and place them on a rubber mat like you've been asked to a million times.  It was like they were artists and mud was the medium they liked to work with - splashes, splatters, and globs across the floors and halfway up the walls, all framed beautifully by their wet coats and other clothing carefully arranged on their invisible floor hooks. Ah!  The memories!

But, I digress.

Now I have a larger porch with a lighter coloured floor.  I don't know what I was thinking there, but I'll bet you I didn't make that decision in March.  There are only two humans living here and yet there are six pairs of boots; two neatly on the mat and four others strewn across the floor.  The two on the mat are relatively clean, the others are twice their normal weight with mud, and surrounded by the residue tramped in from outside the last five times they've been worn.  I'm going to wait until this mid-winter thaw is over and then I'm going to gather up all this freshly harvested soil, mix in a little peat moss, and start an early indoor garden.  It's the same threat I've made for the past 34 years.

That's the kind of thinking a girl gets into with spring edging ever closer - I just want to plant some seeds and watch things grow.