Large Fierce Mammal

Only slightly tongue in cheek snow melt prediction map for Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, courtesy of CBC Meteorologist Kalin Mitchell. (Click to enlarge)

“For my own part, I’ve been around long enough to know the Winter just past as the normalcy of my childhood, when we kids were playing “king of the castle” flinging snowballs in defence of battlements built atop the lofty snowbanks thrown up by the plough that cleared the school parking lot, and this all before Christmas break. I remember hiking in to fish lakes and stillwaters when the blooming of May Flowers, the swarming of Blackflies, and a few deep and persistently slow melting snow drifts, all coexisted in the deepest woods of a Nova Scotia May.” ~ Nature’s Jocularity

Under the headline Maritime snowmelt may not happen until May, says Kalin Mitchell, that worthy explains the inexact science of predicting how long it will take for Nature to reverse the pasting She gave the Maritimes in the comparatively short interval from the start of February until now. Considering what I wrote yesterday, and quoted above, you will understand that predictions that fall near the middle of May come as no surprise to me.

In that vein, I have another picture for you that I took just yesterday morning in my back yard, after the previous day’s sun and slightly above freezing temperatures had succeeded in revealing the top inch or so of my chopping block. That would be the dark oval object in the middle of the picture. This inspired the poem that follows.

Chopping block revelation, 1 April 2015 – a foot and a half high, and sitting on top of a two foot retaining wall. (LFM photo – click to enlarge and make the snow look even deeper)

Deep Thoughts

By LFM

Here you see my chopping block
Revealed just yesterday.
It’s not been seen in all the months
That snow and ice held sway.

It stirs my heart to see it now,
Its brow above the snow,
But n’er forget that this decrees
How far we’ve yet to go.

Full eighteen inches doth it stand,
This chopping block of mine,
Atop two feet of garden wall
Of which there’s still no sign.