It’s cold today. Objectively, it’s not that sort of cold, but after highs in the seventies with breaks in the winds, it feels like it. We have high winds today, without the lulls that punctuated yesterday’s dusty, blustery gale, and even the warming May sun cannot take the edge off the chill in the air. Still, there are new leaves again today: this time, on a few of the stalks in the giant stand of red willows outside the kitchen door. There are also many stalks among them that will never leaf again, to say nothing of the even larger [or more thoroughly dead] stand over by the pond now seemin ..read more

Most years, we leave April in an extended gust of wind and residual bare cold, hoping our world will flower in May. This year at Red Willow, on this last day of April, we have blossoms already. When the calendar ticks over into May tomorrow, land and air will both be warming, in early leaf and flower in the golden spring light. Wind is forecast for the next two weeks, of course — later in the season than once was our norm, but now common, if nothing that could be called normal. They’re not projected to be the gale-force winds of the early part of the season, but more than strong enough to mak ..read more

April’s penultimate day, and we are still awaiting the emergence of the aspen leaves. Virtually all of the other trees have begun unfurling their springs fringes and shawls. Even in yesterday’s snow and sleet, the smaller fire maple’s blossoms began to give way to green, leaves now clearly visible, if not wholly open yet. That storm has proven to be a great gift: Aside from the softening of the ground, it has reawakened every blade, every leaf, every stalk and branch. All stand a little taller today, a little livelier, reaching for cloud-studded blue skies in a small but steady revival. We sp ..read more

This weekend, we have been blessed. Snow, rain, both combined: not enough to stick, barely enough to pool, but more than enough to soak the ground thoroughly. There is, of course, a new dusting of white on the peaks and slopes, but down here, it’s now just water, and even that has, as far as one can tell right now, entirely stopped falling. Still, what so often yesterday was the storm at the edge of the sky has inverted this day — perhaps more accurately expressed as the sky at the edge of the storm, with scant patches of blue showing through what remains a heavy, close blanket of the sort of ..read more

Now we know it’s truly spring here: We have had every conceivable kind of weather conditions today already . . . and the day’s only half over. Bright sun, stormclouds, winds, rain, sleet, graupel, snow, even fog — every one of those has put in an appearance here today, and at the moment, sun and clouds and snow and rain are all vying for primacy directly overhead. At this moment, clouds and snow seem to be winning decisively. The air is cold, of course, much colder than we have had in recent weeks. This is, perhaps, winter’s last dance until year’s end, and it seems intent on making the most ..read more

It has been a day, and in the course of all the upheaval, it feels as though we have had a half-dozen different days, with every single type of spring weather, telescoped into this one. It began with sun, and the usual post-dawn chill, warming up slowly but consistently thereafter. By late morning, however, the winds were already wreaking havoc, and such momentary warmth as we had been granted vanished summarily. The wind began to move the clouds in from the northwest, and with every veiling of the su, the mercury seemed to drop twenty degrees . . . and then the cycle predictably circled arou ..read more

At mid-morning, there was a single small cloud in the northeast sky. All the rest was blue; no clouds, no haze in sight. And yet the forecast predicts rain and/or snow for tonight into tomorrow, with the possibility of such conditions continuing into Sunday. Now, at midday, the air remains just as clear, but the blue expanse overhead is studded everywhere with bold trailing bands of white — not yet the sort of clouds that would produce any weather, but their precursors, the sort that will eventually coalesce into something far greater than the sum of their parts, blossoming into the beauty an ..read more

Some days are just hard on every front. That’s always more true at this time of year than any other, when season and weather conspire to create chaos from one moment to the next. Today was no exception: A lovely high in the low seventies while we kept appointments and ran errands was demolished the moment we returned home, when the tailwind that brought us back transfigured itself into a trickster wind, bent on battering everything in its path. Now, toward day’s end, the air feels much colder than it actually is, and the clouds moving in only add to the feel that winter is thinking of staging ..read more

It’s warmer today, having hit seventy well before noon, although the light-breeze-turned-suddenly-trickster-wind makes it feel much colder. Our skies today are not as clear, either: bright spring blue, yes, but covered with a patchwork of puffy white clouds on all sides and overhead. Puffy white clouds that, as they drift together and coalesce, are increasingly gray. This is not, of course, the gray of a gathering storm. These are the pre-monsoonal skies more common to the first days of summer, as the atmospheric patterns seek to find their early rhythm — not the kind that produces rain, but ..read more

I say routinely that spring is the hardest season her, and that is true. But there is one aspect of this trickster season that is an ongoing gift: the endless parade of “firsts” of the year that begin to manifest now. For the most part, they are all early this year, too, apparently a product of climatic warming combined with the rare precipitation we received a couple of weeks ago. The earliest that I can recall actually occurred in mid-March, two full months early: a female Western tanager darting up under the eaves of the deck, just outside the northeast living room windows, searching for a ..read more