Patience is a Virtue

It snowed.  I know, I know, snow here isn't really big news but, this was significant snow...especially for the first of March.  General consensus was that we got around 14 inches in this one storm.  My neighbors across the road, who have lived here their entire lives, said it was the most they could remember in one blow.  It was amazing to watch the big, fat, wet flakes coming down and coming down and, still, coming down.

 

 School was closed.  Roads were closed.  Appointments were canceled.  It was truly a snow day.  We had biscuits for breakfast, built a warm fire, and snuggled in. Peter built a snow family in the front yard and created a snow fort from the pile left by the snow plow earlier in the day.  Our neighbor, Butch, kindly plowed our driveway so we could get out, if need be.  The snow was really deep.
 
 When the storm started, I was in a kind of disbelief.  It was the first of March, after all.  It was time for a little spring action.  Just a couple weeks ago I was finding snowdrops in the yard.  Hope was springing eternal...or something like that.  

But I have found that, living on the Palouse, March does not guarantee spring...in fact, neither does April or May, for that matter.  Winter leaves slowly, kicking and screaming, and one must be patient.  I've learned to wait another week or two to plant those porch pots, even when I'm dying for some flowers.  If I do it too early, the flowers are the ones dying and I have to start over again.  

And I was just talking last week about it being time to plant the snow peas and sweet peas, according to my past few years' garden journal entries.  I think I'll be waiting on those for a bit longer, too.  It's going to take a while for 14 inches to melt completely away.

It was as if the snow gave us permission to just hang out and not worry about going anywhere or doing anything.  All in all, it turned out to be a lovely day.