Photo of the Day: Donut-Hole Snow Mound, Englewood NJ

We’re almost two weeks into spring, but the mountain of snow and silt from the late February blizzard that my hometown deposited in the greenery of Veterans Park has only dwindled without entirely disappearing. The “mountain” had become a hill, and, at last, just a mound.

Then yesterday, I saw something unusual, which I tried to capture in this photo. At that point early in the day, a large round hole had opened beneath a thin arch of snow overhead.

I peered more closely. I could see drops falling from the arch. Higher temperatures (they reached the high 70s later in the day) would, before long, eliminate that thin white veneer overhead.

And so it proved. This morning, the hole was gone and the snow pile was even more noticeably lower.

Continued above-freezing temperatures, along with rain over the next few days, should eliminate the white stuff at last, leaving only a memory of a storm that for a while left streets impassable and frustrated those of us who had to shovel.

Photo of the Day: Mountain of Snow, Veterans’ Memorial/Depot Square Park, Englewood NJ

I took the image accompanying this post two days ago, after rising temperatures had helped melt some of the 27 inches of snow from earlier in the week. To clear space in the large parking lot just north of our city’s downtown, a tractor moved all that white stuff into a mammoth pile.

Make that two mammoth piles. The one seen here was in the park. Another was in a single spot in the parking lot.

Believe it or not, these piles were even wider and higher when the tractor finished its work. I’m just hoping that Mother Nature will take care of the rest in short order and reduce it all to large puddles.

Photo of the Day: The Calm Before the Snowstorm

Like so many New Jerseyites, I waited patiently for the 12-plus inches of snow from the storm in late January to melt away. In the past week, courtesy of higher temperatures and rain, it finally receded to a more manageable level.

Then came the news that four weeks to the day of that big storm, another, with maybe even more snow and higher winds, was going to hit.

I wasn’t in the best frame of mind, then, when I drove out to Overpeck Park, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ, for the kind of walk I hadn’t been able to take in weeks. Despite large puddles in spots, many other area residents felt similarly and circled the large track on the field.

If anything heartened me as I thought of what was to come within 24 hours (and even as I type this, I can see the flakes following), it was that earlier this winter, the days would have been shorter and I wouldn’t have able to take the attached picture of the glorious late-afternoon sky—and that it might take less time for traces of this latest brutal storm to disappear.

Song Lyric of the Day (Bob Dylan, Evoking a Couple’s ‘Winterlude’)

“Come on, sit by the logs in the fire
The moonlight reflects from the window
Where the snowflakes, they cover the sand.”—American singer-songwriter and Nobel Literature laureate Bob Dylan, “Winterlude,” in the New Morning LP (1970)

A beautiful scene to think of as much of this country becomes snowbound…

Quote of the Day (Percy Bysshe Shelley, on a Cloud Sifting ‘Snow on the Mountains Below’)

“I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast;
And all the night 'tis my pillow white,
While I sleep in the arms of the blast.”— English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), “The Cloud,” originally published in 1820, reprinted in The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1994)
 
As I type this, some form of winter precipitation is falling outside my window. I’ve thrown up my hands on whether, or how much of, it will amount to snow. (Forecasts for my county predict anywhere from 4 to 9 inches, but the “Weather” app on my iPhone says my town will get 1 to 3 inches, with the rest being rain or “wintry mix.”)
 
I have certainly had my share of snow in my lifetime, though it has diminished in the past couple of decades. Even so, that experience consisted of at best short hills in the northern New Jersey suburb where I have long resided. I had nothing like the experience that Shelley and his young wife Mary had in 1816 when they were staying in the Swiss Alps.
 
(The image accompanying this post, of Jungfrau in the Swiss Alps, was taken on Apr. 10, 2011, by Carlosvi04london.)

Quote of the Day (Hal Borland, on Why December ‘Is Neither Bleak Nor Colorless’)

“True, December can be raw and cold and its days sometimes are dark, but it is neither bleak nor colorless. Go outdoors soon after sun-up, which now comes late, and even on a lowering day you probably will find a frosty scene of dazzling beauty. If the day is clear it can be a world transformed by frost or snow, newly created, fragile as spun glass, ephemeral as the passing hour.”— American writer, journalist and naturalist Hal Borland (1900-1978), Twelve Moons of the Year, edited by Barbara Dodge Borland (1979)

Though the sun had not yet come up, I awoke this morning to see a thin layer of snow on the ground. Quite a contrast with last winter, when, a local weatherman said last night, snow did not arrive in New York City until February 1.

Let’s see what happens this winter. Unlike when I was a kid, I don’t look forward to snow—I have to shovel it and drive in it, rather than digging out my sled and sliding down a hill in my neighborhood. But I also know that a year with little to no snow in this part of the country is a sign of something wrong.

(I took the image accompanying this post exactly four years ago today, in Overpeck County Park, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ. That December really was bleak, but for reasons unrelated to the landscape. It was, you might recall, when COVID-19 raged and fear stalked the land.)

Photo of the Day: New Jersey’s Big Melt

Throughout the past month—and especially after the blizzard that afflicted my area a few weeks ago—New Jersey residents have been praying for an end to the cold and snowy weather. Judging from the last few days, that request now seems to have gone straight from our lips to God’s ear.

All around my house, for instance, the height of the snowbanks I erected out of necessity a few weeks ago—and kept adding to every couple of days with several more inches—has now noticeably diminished. It was even more apparent this afternoon in one of my favorite places for walking, Overpeck County Park, near me in Bergen County NJ.

As you can see from this photo I took, the sun was out strong, creating puddles everywhere. Thankfully, the snow has been able to melt gradually, over a few days, so that we have not been beset by a flood to follow the blizzard.

A meteorologist on the news channel I watch said early tonight that we should get average to warmer temperatures compared with the seasonal norm over the next 10 days.  That should help keep our reservoir from going dry, at least for a while.

Only one “weather event” at a time, please! Okay?

Photo of the Day: Making Themselves at Home

With two sizable dumps of snow over the last two weeks—and only minimal melting, and pedestrians disinclined to cut across icy green expanses—these creatures found a welcome environment in Veterans Park, a short walk from where I live in Englewood, NJ. When I saw they weren’t objecting, I took the attached photo

Photo of the Day: The (Snowy) Walls of Jericho

Monday morning, I awoke to find six inches of snow on the ground already. It quickly got worse. A lot worse.

A Facebook friend in my town posted that the last she had checked, she had received 17 inches of snow. I did not bother to measure what fell around my house, because I did not want to feel any worse than I did already.

This picture I took of my driveway will give you an idea why. I piled the snow as high as I could. I had no other choice—there was nowhere else to put it.

With overnight cooling, that “wall” you see here (you didn’t see how much else I shoveled outside this frame!) is going to be pretty impregnable for a while. That trumpet Joshua used at Jericho might have been dramatic, but it won’t do the job on this one.

So tonight, the local weather forecasters were predicting another coastal storm that they pronounced as “significant.”

Isn’t there a quota for blizzards—like, no more than one a year?

Quote of the Day (John Updike, on Exiting a High School to the Snowstorm Outside)

“What a crowd! What a crowd of tiny flakes sputters downward in the sallow realm of the light above the entrance door! Atoms and atoms and atoms and atoms. A furry inch already carpets the steps. The cars on the pike travel slower, windshield wipers flapping, headlight beams nipped and spangled in the ceaseless flurry. The snow seems only to exist where light strikes it.”— American man of letters John Updike (1932-2009), The Centaur: A Novel (1962)

Snow was common in the rural Pennsylvania area where John Updike grew up and where his early novel is set. I can still recall times seeing snowflakes as I stepped out of the gym of my high school in northern New Jersey in the 1970s. 

But over the last few years, it has become a rather unusual sight. Earlier this week, TV meteorologists were telling us that there were only five inches of snow for the entire winter last year in Central Park.

The snowstorm that blew through late Wednesday into Thursday, the biggest in this area of the Northeast in the last five years, has more than made up for that total already. Updike’s description hints at the danger in such a dangerous storm, but it is overwhelmed by the lyricism of this passage.

In the same way, it is lovely to look out at snow, and even more so to write about it—but, at a certain age in life (which I’m afraid I have reached), not so much to be in the midst of it—steering one’s car if one needs to drive, shoveling as bitter winds blow about you, shoveling again when city plows push the snow back into the driveway and sidewalk you’ve struggled to clear, and walking gingerly on streets that have iced up overnight.

Quote of the Day (Ernest Hemingway, on Why Snow Was Beautiful in Paris)

“Snow is never more beautiful than in the city. It is wonderful in Paris to stand on a bridge across the Seine looking up through the softly curtaining snow past the grey bulk of the Louvre, up the river spanned by many bridges and bordered by the grey houses of old Paris to where Notre Dame squats in the dusk. It is very beautiful in Paris and very lonely at Christmas time.” —American fiction writer and Nobel Prize laureate Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), “Christmas at the Roof of the World,” Toronto Star Weekly, Dec. 22, 1923, collected in By-Line Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades, edited by William White (1967)

(The image accompanying this post shows Hemingway with F. Scott Fitzgerald, frenemy and fellow American expatriate in 1920s Paris.)

Quote of the Day (Thomas Hardy, on a Snowy Cemetery)

“The tripletime beat

Bounds forth on the snow,

But the spry springing feet

Of a century ago,

And the arms that enlaced

As the couples embraced,

Are silent old bones

Under graying gravestones.”—English poet-novelist Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), from “Music in a Snowy Street,” in Hardy: Poems (Everyman’s Library, Pocket Poets Series, 1985)

Photo of the Day: Just Too Soon for Spring

When I was a lad in the early Seventies, a popular margarine commercial’s tagline was, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!” And, indeed, the lady decided to have her revenge on us this year—first with a major tease, with a couple of days recently hovering around 70 degrees, and then the blizzard that hit the Northeast coast these past 24 hours. The storm occurred just a week before spring. Grrrr.

On Facebook, a number of New Yorkers seemed rather disappointed that, after all the hype, they got virtually nada in the Snow Department. But it was all a matter of where you were, and where Mother Nature deemed to vent her fury.

I took the picture you see here around 10:30 this morning. When I got back inside the house, the newscasters were saying that my town, Englewood, NJ, had 6.2 inches. It felt like more—and, in short order, there was more. Within half an hour of this picture being taken, you would never have known I had stepped out the door grimly, shovel in hand.

About 4 o’clock, I returned. As I dug in, I took a quick estimate. Well, it wasn’t any deeper than the morning. But, after a few minutes, it sure felt like it. In the several intervening hours, a layer of sleet had been added to the mixture, adding to the burden. As bad as I felt, I consoled myself with the thought that at least I wasn’t one of those people who had to drive today, with the roads being positively treacherous.

Early tonight, the meteorologist on my news station said Englewood had received a grand total of 10.5 inches. It felt worse—maybe 1.5 inches more—and, as I looked outside, it was worse. Again. Oh, they were just “flurries.” But for me and the various neighbors who’d spent so much time digging out, we didn’t want to see one single speck of the white stuff again—even if Mother Nature is peeved (about being fooled, about climate change—pick your poison).

Photo of the Day: Shoveled Out

Well, not quite: I still had a section of my driveway to take care of. And you see the bottom of the driveway? This was before three city plows, in succession, pushed more snow into a space that had just been cleared out, forcing me out again to clear it before it hardened.

But at least this view from my front porch was a lot better than it had been at the height of the snowstorm this morning.

Now all I have to do is rest my weary bones and watch for the ice these next few days…