CONSTANT TUGGING OF WINTER TIME
BY DON DOUCETTE
We must admit apart from traditional seasonable grumbling, our streets are generally cleared more quickly of snow and ice following winter storms.
I look out at our own street this morning following our weekend storm – it’s dry to the pavement and I remember four decades ago this same thoroughfare periodically covered beneath a dangerous layer of rutted snow and ice following winter storms, and…that awful hazardous layering often lingered for weeks following bone-chilling cold snaps with stretches of single numbers and below zero fright-nights.
We generally do better with clearing snow these days, although the debate persists about the materials used to treat snow and ice. The concern remains about harmful run-offs reaching deeply and leaching through our watersheds, yet life goes on.
And with the sun slipping agonizingly and temptingly higher day-by-day as we rebel against being cold, the natural call to nature is trumpeting ever mutely, day-to-day ever so slowly, yet constantly, like the ever-present pull of gravity.
Migrating birds in some distant and unthought of locations are feeling this tug and many are gradually working themselves this way.
Saps in growing things are stirring and, in a few weeks, we may visibly observe tree buds begin to swell – all a form of natural anticipation.
Justifiably so, in a predictable slow-motion advance following the natural passing of another chilly winter season – ground hog and all.
Don Doucette
“Ten Mile River Rambles”
Friends of the Ten Mile and Bucklin Brook
Citizens of the Narragansett Basin