Photo of the Day: Hinge Moment, Late Winter

This past Sunday, the weather reports indicated that my area of New Jersey could get anywhere from a dusting to two or three inches of snow. I have learned, through hard experience this past winter, that the weathermen can keep tacking on two or three inches throughout the day, until a "dusting" can become substantial indeed.

The skies were gray, then, as I walked down to the park near my home in Englewood, NJ. Yet the presence of so many geese on the ground, after seeing so few of them or their feathered friends throughout this season, felt oddly comforting. Did they know something we humans didn’t?

Maybe. We ended up getting only a dusting past midnight (and my friends in Minnesota would regard the New Jersey version of “dusting” as hardly even worth the name). It’s been cold—mighty cold, at points—this week, but nothing more has been added to the ground at this point in the form of snow or ice. In fact, their presence has abated markedly throughout the week.

The calendar says we have only two weeks of winter left. I’ve learned over the years to expect almost anything in these last days of the season. (We even had a “snowacane”—a combination of snow and hurricane—in my neck of the woods four years ago, only two days before St. Patrick’s Day.) Still, at this point, I, like so many other people, are grateful just for the chance to catch my breath, to admire the still-considerable amounts of snow piled up at points, and to hope that something better--warmer--is not far off.