Cheap Tricks

7 PM and sunlight began to disappear, throwing a pallid hue as appealing as last night’s dishwater. Beneath the last call of the day’s light – turbid snow, pocked with the scars of melting and freezing, every dead twig, branch and limb that fell during the winter standing like a two-day stubble on the acne-scarred face of an old man. Nothing pretty, except it’s pretty cold.

It is a dirty trick, changing the clocks forward a month early. The extended light at the end of the day should be accompanied by the damp yet warmer temperatures of spring, sounds of the peepers’throaty chorus and red wing black bird’s singing above the tender buds of pussy willows. All signals that with just a few weeks of warmer weather the saturated earth will dry, fiddle heads will uncurl and the long shadows of winter will recede.

Instead a light sprinkle of silver snow blows across an encrusted snow still deep enough to rise to one’s thigh. Vermont Public Radio forecasts eight degrees in the North County. Horses huddle around the feeding trough wearing shaggy coats, and if lucky, blankets. Across the road I heard three hoots of a barn owl as I watch Diablo find three blades of grass near the vent to the clothes dryer. “Come on in here before the owl gets ya,” I warn her.

It sure as hell ain’t spring out here and I’m freezing.