The muddy road ahead
Mud season!! The end of my road, before it reaches the black top, gets very rutted and muddy when the snow melts each spring. It is always an adventure driving the car through the mud, swinging from side to side and hoping another car doesn't come along going the other way.
Sometimes the ruts are quite deep, and then it is great to have a high car so the undercarriage doesn't scrape. Sometimes mud season happens all at once, with days of muddy roads and slippery driving. Other times it happens in stages: mud, freeze, mud, freeze. When the mud freezes cars can get trapped if it doesn't thaw during the day and if the mud is deep enough.

Old snow
Snow is beautiful when it first falls, and here for some time afterward because there isn't much traffic exhaust to blacken the snow. But eventually it does get dirty, and it does melt, and then everything looks really yucky. There is no other way to put it--yucky.
The ground is muddy with clumps of dirty ice melting, the snow is rotting with blackened edges, and all sorts of long forgotten things surface from below the snow. It is not a great time of year, and certainly one never featured in calendars!

Hydrangea in snow


I saw this dried blossom lying in a footprint in the snow. It amazes me that something so delicate could survive wind, ice, snow, rain and now melting snow.
I do not know if it was blown into the print by the wind or if it was under the snow for sometime, blown and buried during a storm.

Spring Forward!!!
Or should I say, "sprang forward??" Springed? Sprung?? Who cares? After all, it is after 6 pm and the sun still has not slipped behind that hill.
The sun is moving north too, not long ago the sun was setting further to the left in this picture.
Moving the clock forward is one of my favorite days of the year.

Sedum with cat tracks.
Remember the sedum with snow on top? It is almost buried in snow now. Even with all of the snow we got it was never completely buried. The recent warm days have receded the snow, but it is still quite deep, particularly in this area of the yard where the wind blows it into drifts made deeper by the snowbanks from the road.

March 7, temperature in the late afternoon.

What a difference a day makes.












March 8, Morning temperature





And the next day:
March 9, morning temperature!! A heat wave!! Bring out the bathing suits, shorts and sandals.

Coffee stop.
This is a place where I sometimes stop for coffee on my drive to work. It sort of looks like a last outpost or something. Often there are a few snowmobiles getting gas.
It is a general store and a small restaurant. I like it, because the road beyond, while beautiful, is long and there is no where to stop for many miles.
An outpost indeed!

Our house in the snow.
There really is a lot of snow! These are the snowbanks along the road, but it is almost as deep behind the banks.
If you click on the picture to make it full frame you can see that the snow goes up to the porch (we did shovel a small path, though) and up to the front door.
There are tamped-down paths where I walk across the yard, but the snow is over my knees.

Off to Austria and Germany!
Away goes my son, meeting his school's bus, which we jokingly call Das Bus, to the airport and off to Europe for two weeks. He has his ski boots, helmet, ski pants, and oh, yeah, a few clothes in those two bags.