jaeleslie

It's up in the sixties today and I walked a long way over through the park and the lake past the zoo. It was just a couple weeks ago we finally got the winter wonderland that was due three months ago, and the snow was nice and white, six inches of it with no big piles of dirty slush and packed ice underneath which would be more usual, and cold enough the ice got very thick on the lakes when it had been kind of on and off all winter up to now. Everyone else in the country seems to have had our share of winter, while we are (as usual one way or another) an anomalous pocket. But the sun is so high at this season that lo the winter is past. In the last couple of days the snow has mostly melted and we are down to the dirty slush with its strange damp dusty smell.

The north side of the creek is melting from the top, a couple of feet of water running over ice still a couple feet deep, not yet breaking up but just quietly melting, and parts are entirely open. Between the bridge into the Arboretum and the little Wingra dam where the creek drops a foot or so there's a big fishing pond, where you can still walk out on the ice from the south side in the shade of the trees, and I saw a couple of guys there in their shirt sleeves, ice fishing. (Guy on the rocky north bank fishing with a line in the open water by the dam.) Warm sunny day, wearing teeshirts but no coats, they were out in the middle of a huge rotten slab of ice, one sitting on an upturned bucket as usual and the other crouching in the crunchy surface, with their lines through the ice, but no other winter gear.

I thought that was a pretty interesting thing to see.