mounds of melting, filthy icesunrise – 6:42 (7:42)
winter countdown – day 79 of 90

The daylight-savings-times are in parenthesis. I’m using the non-daylight-savings to keep the ongoing record in the same time-frame. (On December 9, sunrise was at 7:32. We had 9.5 hours of daylight. Three months, we got 12 hours and 20 minutes of daylight.)

A couple of weeks ago when the ground had at least 4 inches of snow, it rained and turned the entire snow-cover into ice. And after the rain, it snowed. The ice was covered with another 3 inches of new snow. So, the melt has been slow. There are puddles everywhere. (I associate spring melt and puddles with Sault Ste Marie. On one side there was the relief of spring and then the puddles and the sand making the streets miserable.)

I’ve been trying to clear the back-yard so the dogs aren’t walking on the filthy, melting ice or walking into the freezing puddles. I use a heavy-duty scrapper with a shovel handle to break up the ice into chunks and then move them to clear as much of the back-yard as possible.

The large image on the left shows the ice chunks on the bricks below Wright’s Sprite. The flat, terracotta pieces at the base of the Sprite are brick-facing from my neighbor’s garage. As they fall, I collect them and use them as shims to balance pots and other garden ornaments.

The shards remind me of the rocks on Gertrude Steins’ and Alice B. Toklas’ grave marker in Père Lachaise Cemetery. It was the first time I had seen the rocks on a Jewish grave. One explanation is that flowers, though beautiful, will eventually die. A stone will not die, and can symbolize the permanence of memory and legacy. (The kids and I have painted rocks and left them on Jo’s grave-marker.)

Yesterday the weather was warm enough to break up a lot of the ice-cover. I shoveled all the ice chunks from the path leading to the back-gate out into the alley – Sampsonia Way. Paul accused me of being an old Italian, moving my snow and ice out onto the city street. Well, by this morning all the snow and ice I moved had been crushed by the passing cars and it was all melted. Left in my back-yard it would still be there creating puddles.