A touch of spring in winter

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Of course, it is not spring! Of course! Just ask your calendar! Yet here I sit inside our house, thinking that perhaps in a week or so, I will be sitting on our deck. I know many question the existence of global warming, but I’m here to tell you that something is fishy.

For a week we have been granddog sitting. Millie has become so much part of our lives that I’m not sure we will give her back to James. I know, what does this have to do with global warming? Well, the weather in the last week has warmed to the point that our daffodils are on the brink of popping buds and in some yards flowers are still blooming. Our yard looks more like spring then winter.

We waited for snow but it just whispered at us. I bought a warmer coat and new boots. The coat has barely been wrapped around my usually freezing body. We walk outside to see if it is warm enough to sit out there. “You know, I have sat out here when it was this cool in the summer,” I told my husband. He heartily agreed.

There comes a point in the fall where I yearn for winter snow. Now that the weather is warming and the flowers and trees are speaking ‘spring’, I find that I no longer want that snow. We are even having a gas fireplace installed in our living room. We have needed it just to take off the chill in the house. I now wonder if it will become a novelty in our now warm climate.

Remember the smells on the farm when spring approached? Of course there was the overpowering scent that seemed to hug the earth when the barns were cleaned out from the winter’s long months of animals hunkering down there. But there was always a freshness in the air. It was as if the air had been washed for a new season. Freshly plowed soil has an essence all its own. Warmed earth and dewy mornings preamble the season to come. Now I sniff the air and have the same feelings of those days on Neff Road.

No, it is not spring. I feel as though we have been cheated of a season for the second time in a row. I silently hope for a deer to come moseying up to me to tell me how magical it is to have spring in the winter. I think both are improbabilities.

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By Pamela Loxley Drake

On Neff Road

Pamela Loxley Drake is a former resident of Darke County and is the author of Neff Road and A Grandparent Voice blog. She can be reached at [email protected]. Viewpoints expressed in the article are the work of the author. The Daily Advocate does not endorse these viewpoints or the independent activities of the author.

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