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Per my weather app, 2.4″ of the lovely white stuff has descended upon us in the last six hours with an additional accumulation of three to four inches in the next twenty-four.

We’ve been living in a November landscape all winter. There were two minor snowfalls in December, I believe, but they didn’t last long, melted quickly, leaving us with nothing to look at outside our windows but a dull, dreary, brown terrain. More snow is forecast later this week and early the next.

We need the precipitation and I’m so happy it’s come at last!

Photos aren’t the best but, well, you get the picture…

😎

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The holiday hoopla is over and done. All fine and well and good. It’s a New Year. We’re moving on. Already, resolutions made and broken. Such is life.

And now, the COLD spell begins. I saw a headline in my Google feed this morning containing those dreaded, winter-month words, polar vortex. Yikes! I remember well, those frigid days and weeks, from just a few years back.

Ah, well. Bring it on, I say. We’re Iowans, Midwesterners. We can handle a few frozen temperatures. We’ve got Netflix and Hulu and Apple + TV. There are LOADS of books on our shelves and downloaded to our Kindles (and we know where to get more). There’s the Internet! Streaming! Painting tutorials: watercolors, Bob Ross, acrylics! We’ve got quilting, reorganizing, Sudoku, baking bread, crock-pot lasagna. Take-out, for crying out loud.

Knife sharpening!

The miraculous wonders of YouTube….

Yeah, we’ll manage alright. That doesn’t mean we have to like it.

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Stuck in the thick of it, those plunging temperatures, bitter winds, ice-slicked roads and sidewalks, it can feel like this will be our world from here on out, nothing for it but gray, gloomy skies and the isolation of the polar darkness we experienced just a short week or so ago.

And then, there’s a day like today! Bright-lit & mild, calm and peaceful, sunshine just oozing through the late December air. Our car’s temperature gauge delivered us the magnificent news: fifty-six glorious degrees! Not that we needed a digital device to tell us what a wonderful day it was for our walk, puppy straining at his leash, a broad canine smile and merry eyes that would melt any human’s heart.

Oh, there will be more nasty winter weather to come, no doubt. This is Iowa, after all. We’re hale, stout, hardy creatures, those of us who’ve lived here our whole lives. We’re used to it. We can handle the tough stuff, even with three to four months of winter spread out before us. No matter. It won’t last forever, despite the doubt that sometimes creeps in. Spring, that now-elusive delight, is something we ought not to tempt ourselves with just yet. It, after all, isn’t even the first of January yet! But, still, we can tuck it away, that certain knowledge that warm, sunny, balmy weather will inhabit our days before too (terribly) long.

Today, just for today, I can deal with that.

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mangled, dry, a crisp crunch underfoot

the last season’s mowing more than a month past

all that remains until the cover of not-yet-come snowfall

is to pick up after puppy, his leavings throughout the yard

fairway #4 spreads out beyond the wrought-iron fence

the trees and the pond, trending of late with Canada geese

and a different manner of leavings…

all of it this morning blanketed in a mist of hardened nightfall

beautiful in its uniformity, somber under the weight

of what lies before us