Evaporation

While not reaching the low, low levels of cold that we experienced earlier in the winter, the air is still very chill, below freezing, in fact.

But the spring light is doing its duty, shrinking the piles of snow in our yard every day.

I tried to take a picture that would be clear enough to illustrate what this process looks like but to no avail. There are just some things you can't capture in a digital photograph. But let me describe this to you.

It's too cold to melt so we're not getting mud or waves of water crisscrossing our roads. But the snow, like the Wicked Witch of the West at the end of the Wizard of Oz, is going away—through evaporation.

You see, the sun merges the snowflakes into ice crystals. These crystals then line up like so many soldiers so the striations point at the sun's principal direction while simultaneously retreating from it. If you held your hands up in the classic "I'm afraid of the monster" pose you see in melodramas, you'd get the idea here.

The closer you get to the ground, the closer these ice crystals pack together until you get a sheet of ice.

And the sun is steadily wicking the snows of January, February and early March away, one ice crystal at a time.

I suppose, as much as I wish it would warm up, that this type of melt is the better way to get through this part of spring. It's not adding a lot of water to the rivers and streams so flooding is much less of an issue. The dirt roads around here—which vary from horrendous to don't-go-there-until-June—are a bit more stable than they would be otherwise.

And the sugar makers are loving this. We've had tough maple seasons the past two years so, hopefully, this will make up for some of that.

But I want to go outside and play!!