Back In Sync

It has been a strange winter.

The absolute lack of snow, not that I missed shoveling or driving in it, has put everyone here on edge. It’s just unnatural… nervous laughter when talking about the weather… that vague sense of unease when leaving home in the morning and the world looks like November.

It finally snowed yesterday, a good 8 inches, with lots more heading east. The disparity between calendar and climate has been reconciled, I can walk between snowdrifts now on my way to get a paper and not have to look at Halloween candy wrappers frozen where they fell nearly three months ago.

The fresh snow is pretty, but more comforting is the fact that now we can finally watch the snow go through its familiar phases: white, fluffy, crusted, dirty, melted, refrozen, and, ultimately, gone. We were waiting for the snow cycle to start, perhaps our concern was that if it didn’t start sometime, we would be stuck in a Twilight-zone like limbo, a cold Omaha where spring would never come.

Spring will come, life will bloom again on the prairie, and once again the circle will be complete.