The other day I was on a conference call with someone from Northern California. He asked “Is it spring there yet?” I can only conclude that he’s never been to North Idaho. As he told us about how flowers were blooming there, I was watching snow fall outside my window. Here spring does not happen in February. Sometimes it doesn’t even happen in May.
Groundhog notwithstanding, we invariably get a lot more than six weeks of winter after February 2. As my husband is fond of pointing out, February 5 is the official mid-winter point. So now here at the end of February, we’re over the hump. The days are getting longer, and the skiing is definitely still good. Plus, we’ve all survived that hideous 6-week stretch of gray and we’re getting sunny days again. But is it Spring? Hardly.
When it’s sunny like it is today though, it’s easy to imagine the arrival of spring once again. The gardening catalogs are arriving fast and furiously in my mailbox these days. Even the local garden center is advertising an Early Bird seed sale on the big sign out in front of their store.
As they say in the Schweitzer Mountain snow report, sunny days like today are “bluebird” days. It may not be spring yet, and it will be a while before we see real bluebirds out on our meadow, but it’s sure beautiful. (So we went skiing to take advantage of it!)