XXIII - Halcyon
So, first winter in NC.
(I know it’s March. I update when I feel like it. Hush. XD )
NC cold is different from FL cold. We had to drip pipes for the first time. I learned there was a difference between sleet and freezing rain. We bought portable heaters and had to shovel the driveway. I learned how to make emergency crisco candles. I bought snow boots for everyone in the family (and was glad I did, a couple days later.)
Molly, watching snow come down.
Also, cat update. Back in December, after a stretch of below-freezing days, we officially adopted the orange kitten who’d been living outside in our neighborhood and using our cat shelter. His name is Tamago, and he’s very bite-y. He will happily nibble on your fingers and toes. His purr is very loud.
I think the husband is delighted to have another ginger.
Tamago being the same color as his bed.
His mom, who my husband calls Kora, is still an outdoor neighborhood cat. Before the big snow, one of the neighbors caught her and brought her inside, thankfully, though apparently she hated it. We learned Kora had been alternating between our cat shelter and this neighbor’s. Said neighbor may try to keep her, if they can get her used to being inside. (I have my doubts. Some cats just never adjust. However, I hope she does, as I’ve seen one fox and I’m pretty sure we have coyotes here.)
So, we’re up to five cats. Nobody is upset about that.
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Then we had the Snowpocolypse.
“Historical,” according to people who have lived here for a long time. 6+ inches. A “once in twenty years” kind of event. This was also the weekend after the first historic storm that was supposed to dump several inches of freezing rain on us and knock out power for a week.
(It didn’t, thankfully.)
Having “Rocky Mountains skiing” snow in my own backyard was delightful.
We did not have a snowball fight, alas. It was the fluffy, powdery kind of snow that doesn’t stick together well. We did walk. It was surreal not being able to see the sidewalk and tell where yards ended and the street began.
We shoveled the driveway the next day, and I made a snowman. (Well, a snow cat).
I went for a long walk in the woods about a week later.
We have so many deer in this area, enough that I’ve been hoping to eventually find a shed antler. I’ve since learned that it’s harder to do that in the South, as there aren’t as many bucks. And to be fair, in an entire year of seeing deer in the neighborhood and having them wander through our yard, I have never seen a buck. (They must exist, though, because I see fawns!) So, I still have some hope, enough to keep looking, but not enough to get excited. I also learned that deer drop their antlers later in the South, and thus, early February was likely too early.
There was still plenty of snow on the ground, enough to still need boots.
And, enough that just about every single critter left evidence of its passing.
Footprints delight me.
My writer brain always loves a story, and there were so many stories in the snow. Deer. Squirrels. Cats. Raccoons. At least one bird. At least one rabbit. So many dogs, and people walking dogs, and foxes, and maybe coyotes. (Which would all look like dog prints to my untrained eye).
I especially loved this sidewalk shot.
Footprints compress time in such an interesting way. One person walking one way, a different person walking the other way. Probably walking the small dog whose prints we see, but not necessarily. At least two different deer passed by. Were they together?
Left human could have been walking their pet deer. Right side human might have been walking their cat. It could be that the owners of all these prints walked this particular stretch of sidewalk alone. All occupied the same space, just not at the same time.
It would still look like this.
Really lends credence to the idea that time is, in many ways, an illusion.
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So, now it’s suddenly March, and it’s like winter never existed.
It’s been in the 70s and 80s, which just reminds me of FL. Hot feels normal. Hot feels like “real life”, whereas anything else feels like a pleasant break from reality. I feel like I blinked and suddenly it’s spring, all the trees are blooming, the grass is growing, everything’s waking up.
Another thing I have learned about seasons from finally living through them. If one has ever only watched movies, read books, and seen pictures of seasons, one would come away with the impression that the year is broken up into four more-or-less equal chunks labeled spring, summer, autumn, winter. Right?
Turns out that’s not how it works.
There are functionally only two seasons, summer and winter. Green and brown. The majority of the year is spent inside one of these. Autumn is a brief, glorious month where summer turns colors and then turns brown. Spring is a brief, glorious month where winter turns colors and then turns green. These aren’t seasons like I always pictured seasons. They’re transitional periods. They don’t linger, like summer and winter do.
The spring transition has begun. In a couple weeks, it will functionally be summer outside. That thought kinda makes me sad, and I’m not quite sure why.
The trees know it’s time.
I think, maybe, I wasn’t quite ready for winter to be over.
