Winter Flips Me the Bird. Again.

For weeks I've been reading with a certain degree of envy the joy many house bloggers have experienced at the return of Spring; I've witnessed their delight in their budding fruit trees and the unparalleled happiness that consumes them at that first glimpse of a crocus poking out of the ground.

Well bah humbug, I say.

Here it is nearly the end of March, and Spring is nowhere in sight. What's up with that "in like a lion, out like a lamb" spiel anyway? Have those in charge not looked at the calendar?

Okay, truth be told, the last few days in the Chicago area have warmed up a few degrees. Enough that I took Maggie out back yesterday and she rolled around in the grass and explored her new yard while I began to rake leaves and clean up winter debris. Five big paper lawn bags of it so far! They're in the garage for now; yard waste pickup doesn't begin until April, and I was feeling pretty smug about getting a jump start on the yard.

And I almost wept for pure joy when I raked some leaves away from the fence and saw that there were daffodils coming up! Their leaves were a bit of a sickly yellow because of the debris piled on them, but I was, for a minute, so completely happy and content.

I let my delight so consume me that I even went into the garage and began to drag out an assortment of pots, trellises, and chairs to get ready to arrange and rearrange in back.

"You know it's going to snow tomorrow," Mom said.

"Yeah," I shrugged it off. "It's almost April," I said, as if that said it all. Besides. The last few storms they warned about this month amounted to nothing, not even a dusting.

But oh, I had been lulled into a false sense of well-being.

We had survived the last few winters relatively unscathed; it's been a long time since we've experienced a Real Chicago Winter. And despite the massive amounts of snow that have been falling all season, I still didn't expect to get stomped on by the gods today.

Today, I woke up to this:


And this:

And this:


Not my shiny new pot, too! Nooo!

About six or seven inches in all covered our yard and cars. I looked at it in disgust. It's hard to remember back to an earlier time this year when I thought it was all so pretty.

Gosh dang it, I know it will all melt away in a few days, because the forecasters are calling for fifties by midweek.

It's just that I never did get a photograph of the daffodils.