Winter Brown

It's Been A Few

I've had the browser open, sitting with my header incomplete for days now. Occasionally I'd look at the blankness of the page, and think "Later I will be more interesting," but that's not really happening. So, I'm gonna follow a little canoe of thought down a trickle of a stream of my consciousness and see what happens.

Winter Brown

I know it's usually called winter blues, but blue is a pretty color when matched against the stark white of snow. We had quite a bit of that this winter, and I was very happy for it. It's cold, but snow gives me something to do...shovel all the snow on the deck into a snow ramp for the dottirs, have snowball fights with Baldursdottir while Lokisdottir stomps around and watches her feet like the toddler she is.

But the snow is gone and the mud is back. Even when the temperatures drop below freezing, we still have mud because dirt is brown and mud is even darker brown and the sun loves that shit (which also melts in the yard, by the way. We have two Labs as part of our little zoo...more on that later).

This is the time of year I dislike most, and it's usually the sum of our winters. Though the sunbeams are nice, they lie. It only looks warm outside. It's too cold to play (in the mud and poop), but the indoors feel like a steel trap. The kids are antsy, and only want to watch tv on these days--I can't exactly blame them. Yes, there is the occasional nice day that hits the forties, fifties and even sixties, but they only make spring seem that much more of a fairy tale we tell kids to keep them from losing their little minds. Because no warm day goes unpunished. The freeze will return and back inside we will be, huddling in our little sunspots, thinking we can go outside in shirt sleeves.

All The Melty Things

Not all that glitters is gold, and not all that melts is mud. Poop, as mentioned before and after a long freeze, there is a LOT of it in the yard. I try to scoop it, but often enough it just smears. Yay dogs. Perhaps the worst thing to thaw is several months worth of dead animals. All at once. Because dogs love that. They love to eat it, roll in it, deposit it in the house in various ways. A lot of things die on ten acres in the course of a couple months. So yeah. There's a great deal of cursing and dog bathing that happens, as well as disinfecting with bleach.

The Lying Sunbeam

It calls. So I'm gonna curl up for a bit and pretend I'm napping while Lokisdottir is asleep. If I actually nap, she will be awake in seconds. I've learned this much. They have relaxdar, which is a lot like radar but it only works when parents are finally comfortable enough to relax. The relaxdar goes off in their tiny little heads, an alarm sounds and they hit the ground running as if their lives depend on it.