April in the North

It’s April!

Spring comes slyly to the north. Red-winged blackbirds arrive on the cusp of a thick, wet snow. The eagles huddle in their nest as the winds gather and shove the branches of the great white pines. Juncos flitter across a parking lot where the falling snow changes to sleet, then freezing rain, and back to snow.

Spring is capricious in the north. A trickster god. Somber gray skies are cleaved by sudden blue. Floes of ice streak down the black river. Trumpeter swans and sandhill cranes and mallards and hooded mergansers examine the edges of the ice.

Snow fills up gardens and squats on roofs. Potholes made of ice turn every back road into a slalom course.

“Can you do anything about this?” someone asks me, jokingly.