Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Thaw
No more than 48 hours ago our lawn was covered by gigantic snow mountains. The curbs all over Council Bluffs and Omaha were packed to the bursting with snow they had nowhere else to put when they plowed the streets. The parking lot where I typically park my car during the week was a free-for-all; parking spaces were more left to one's imagination, and their normal rows were replaced by haphazard creations that started with the first person to put the car there, and progressed car by car as cars parked next to cars that approximately seemed to be in some kind of order.
Now everything's melting. I noticed it for the first time, really, today when I was driving and made a turn I make almost every day. This time I didn't have to swing my turn wider to avoid the gigantic glacier in the middle of the road. Now I can see places I haven't seen for weeks--around street corners, curbs, storefronts, and my lawn. With the warmer weather, a small creek developed on the brick street by our garage, and it flowed steadily during the days, when the sun was out. I also noticed that such small creeks were turning up everywhere, and with them, potholes. Massive, cavernous potholes that would make a splashy explosion when someone would hit them, from all the melting runoff flowing into them. The sun was shining, warm enough to make it all melt; there wasn't a cloud in the blue sky, and still it was wet everywhere.
The icy glaciers and mountains are mostly gone now, and the road crews have filled up just about all the potholes. I know because I memorize where they are so I don't drive over them, and as I drove home I noticed many of them had been patched. The fantastic spontaneous creeks have also dried up, and now everything looks brown and dirty, not white and dirty.
I'm finding myself with a peculiar mix of expectations. It's strange to think I'll soon have forgotten everything was covered in snow. Even so, I know we're not already out of the woods. Those potholes aren't all filled, and when I do still hit one I am reminded to still expect some other big, cataclysmic snowstorm before Spring; it is only February, after all. I'm also remembering how, just last year, I was living in St. Paul, and how we still had the same snow on the ground in February that we got in October. Winter was a much more permanent companion of the landscape there; here, at least so far, it seems like it comes to bother things for a while, and then runs off like a bad dream.
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