spring | Song Dog Journal

Winter blew back in overnight a day and a half ago, and on the third day of spring we had four or so inches of snow, a wonderful, heavy, wet snow that cloaked every branch of every tree, every fence post, every roof and rock and hill, every little green and growing thing still clinging close to the ground. Hard to believe that four days ago we had temperatures in the 60s and 70s and were hiking to Hole-in-the-Wall without coats or mittens or snow boots!

Across the snow-covered pastures, on the sheltering hillsides, the Ponderosa pine trees were silver-blue in their wintry cloaks. Deer, startled up, fled silently through the silent trees. Wind had painted ripples into the blanketing white. But the recent spring-like temperatures had already warmed the ground, and our red-dirt driveway was muddy and mostly melted by noon, in spite of the chill day.

The little Kashka cat was moody and desperate, as soon as the snow began to melt. She didn’t seem to mind the dry snow, but she regarded the wet snow with unmasked disdain. She isn’t a particularly vocal cat – In fact, she seems somewhat limited in her vocal expression, sometimes opening her mouth but only producing a breathy squeak. But yesterday, she was whining and moaning and complaining and grumbling as she traipsed through the snow, and shook off her little paws in a futile effort to keep them dry. Her good-for-nothing, lazy brother was, of course, nowhere to be found. I’m sure he was holed up somewhere, dry and comfortable and warm.

I love how the snow completely transforms a landscape, insulates it, hushes it, and the whole world seems to glow with a gleaming, blinding brightness, even beneath a heavy-clouded sky. Simple things take on a new dimension. The same hillsides and meadows and roads shimmer with an ephemeral enchantment, an enchantment that can break within a matter of hours.

Sarah and I took to the snow at 10:00 last night, to ramble in what was likely the last snowfall this season to be lit by a full moon. Never waste a moonlit snow! The sky was crystal clear, and there was the faintest nimbus around the orb of the moon. The brightest stars flickered in the inky blue sky. Orion and Cassiopeia, and a strange bright star we’ve identified before but whose name I can’t remember. Scrambling up deadfall-strewn hillsides to chase the moonlight, slipping and sliding into ravines, dropping flat to make a snow angel, eating snow off the needles of sapling pine trees, stopping every now and again to listen for coyotes, losing track of the time – I could have stayed out all night in that enchanted moonlit snow.

In this shifting of seasons, in the sunshine and the snow, in the change and transformation from month to month, the summer birds begin to arrive with nesting on their minds, and the first insects start to hum and sing. The first of the green things shoot up from the warming earth, and rumors of pasque flowers are whispered. Snow may hide the signs for a day or two, but the seasons will fly on. Springtime is here!

“The trees must know something we don’t know,” Sean told me a few weeks ago, on a day when the sun was particularly warm and the sky particularly blue. The trees were budding out, but barely. Baby leaflets cast a mist of color over the trees’ naked boughs, while the garden flowers and wildflowers were springing up madly from the red earth, blissfully unconscious of any lurking chill. Yet April sailed by on a warm breeze, sometimes a warm gale, and ranchers began to worry that the hay wouldn’t come in this summer if the spring dryness didn’t let up. A week of welcome wet our first week of May allayed those fears, and summer seemed sure to arrive.

Growing up in Illinois, I’ve always taken pride in our changeable and unpredictable weather. It is true, weather in Illinois will change quickly enough, often enough, and drastically enough to eventually suit the tastes of anyone who happens to live there. I had notions of idyllic weather in South Dakota, predictable and constant and with the perfect spring temperatures lasting until June, at which point it would just start to become summery outdoors and one could go around without a sweatshirt.

But talk of snow predicted for this weekend left everyone here a little incredulous. The “one good snow” habitually expected in April never came, and May is well arrived! Yet snow we are getting, and with a vengeance. It has already gone from the sleety, wet stuff in the photo to more of a real snow, with white clinging to the grass and rocks and fences. Probably for a born-and-bred South Dakotan, this is more a nuisance than anything. For ranchers, this is downright offensive, potentially interfering with the well-being of spring calves and shipping. But for a native Oklahoman and long-time resident of Illinois, this is something of a novelty. Snow in May? That’s a never before heard of idea where I came from! For now, I’m enjoying it from the window, but when I have to drive to work today in a few hours, confronting a 14% grade, mountain highways, and twists and turns, I might not enjoy it quite so much. And when the leaf-laden tree branches are shattered, spring flowers are blighted, and the snow melts into a swampy mess, I might very well resent it. And if it causes cattle losses and traffic hazards, I’ll hate it as much as the rest of them.