The year without spring

[bitterwind]

The over 4m of cummulative snow that fell on my home this past winter had me bracing for an epicly soggy spring. The only problem was that spring never really happened - we've skipped it and gone straight to summer. It's shorts-and-straw hat weather with the last vestigages of snowbanks audiably sizzling away under a hot sun. Water levels are

Comments

[lynedd]

Driving over the Speed yesterday, I was stunned to see bare mud on the bottom. Where did all that water go?

The rain we were predicted to get today never happened.

Danger Boy and I both got sunburns this weekend. ...and yes. The ground is dry. It is, frankly, a little scarey.

[bitterwind]

I worry that this might be a bad year for forest fires in the area if we keep up a few more weeks of bright sunny weather. Then again, perhaps everything will suddenly switch to cold and wet.

[lynedd]

There's already been grass-fires along stretches of the 400 near Barrie. It's way too soon for the grass to be that dry...

I'm trying to be optomistic, though. The very-long-range forecast for this area is more seasonally cool and damp, and perhaps we'll actually get there.

[whatawookie]

Where did all the water go?

[bitterwind]

There was a big thaw early in the winter and some people claim the ground never properly froze this year so it's been draining down more than usual. But the last two weeks I think a lot of it sublimated straight into the dry air.

[sylrayj]

I remember when I was a young teen, walking down the laneway to catch the bus. There'd be snow huddled in the shadows of the thin trees and bushes along the fence line, there'd be mud just beyond the gravel used for the laneway, and when you stood in the shadows there you could smell it - mud and that fresh green smell, of cool shadowed growing springtime.

It's been years and years since I smelled springtime. I don't know where it is, where it has gone. :( And I know that my kids have never known it.

[bitterwind]

What I remember most about spring was the creek flooding over a stretch of my parents' laneway that ran alongside it. A few dump trucks of gravel over the years have raised a few inches, but even so it doesn't feel quite as threatening the few times I've been out in the height of spring.