Weather Transition?

 It's hard to know what's happening with our weather at the moment. Yesterday was dreary and miserable most of the day, and late in the afternoon we began to see the rain drops turning to snow, plus the wind picked up. This morning I looked out at a white world (again), one of my lawn chairs was tipped over, along with a small table next to it, and the wind has been unrelenting all day. The sun came out this afternoon and melted most of the snow, but the temperature is still only 41 degrees. With the north wind gusting to 25-30 m.p.h., the wind chill is in the 20s. 

Diane sent this photo of a poor, confused goose on her waterfront this morning. He must be thinking his internal clock is off the mark and sent him north a few weeks too early. He must have had a pretty cold breakfast!

I was at camp this morning, keeping son, Bill, company while he was waiting for the phone man to come to hook up the land lin
e. (Well, actually, he wanted a couple more of the West Danville history books, so I volunteered to deliver them there since he had to hang out to wait for the phone guy.) He had a nice fire going in the Vermont Castings wood stove, and it was pretty comfortable there. It was nice to spend time there - I do miss being at camp, especially on a day like today when the pond is a deep blue with whitecaps. There is a certain excitement about watching the pond change with the weather. We had friends who used to come to visit Fred and me when we lived at camp. They had both spent most of their life near the ocean and for them, sitting by a quiet body of water, one that wasn't constantly moving with crashing waves, was a treat. I think Joe's Pond gets stirred up into waves pretty often, too - more in recent years, it seems, but perhaps that's just my thinking.

Of course, watching the weather from my house is interesting, too - I don't have much for water action - just currents of wind scudding over my little pond, but I can see storms coming down the valley from Walden, usually with lots of rain, snow or fog; and storm clouds from the west sweep over the hillside pretty abruptly sometimes, and often I can see the trees on the high ridge above me tossing in the wind several minutes before it hits where I am. Sometimes just time enough to get under cover before a storm hits. I'm enjoying being able to see more of what's going on in the western sky now that I've had all the big trees cut between my driveway and Jamie's. I still have trees and hills between me and an actual sunset, so it isn't like what we can see from the Plains Cemetery, of course, but it does give me a lot more sunlight and interesting skyline.

Now the wind seems to be dying down a bit - I'm seeing e mph on my weather station, but the temperature is also inching down, so it may be another cold night. Fortunately, not much is happening for buds on trees yet, so our spring is actually about on schedule - in spite of the quirky weather patterns of being too warm or too cold. Perhaps those highs and lows average out and nature adapts. It's the humans who have a hard time with the giant swings.