February Thaw

graphite and colored pencil, from an old sketchbook

The good news here in southern Wisconsin is that the temperatures have risen above freezing the past two days, and it looks like today will be a nice day also.  The rotten old snowbanks are black with road grit, but that same dark color is hastening their melting.  We live on a hill, so rivulets of snow-melt rush down Atwood Avenue.  I drove to East Troy yesterday to meet my sister-in-law and plan a May train trip to Washington state.  All along the way the traffic sent up showers, and I had to depend upon the windshield wipers to see, though the sun was shining brightly. Today I got the storm window in my studio open and shooke out my dust mop.  For months it has been frozen shut.

No new art to show.  I've been doing a little personal journaling, nothing interesting to anybody else.  A fair sized watercolor on Yupo sits nearly done, but not finished.  Ditto for a colored pencil piece.  Fiddle-dee-dee, I'll worry tomorrow.

Rarity

by Michael Belongie, the 2009 Wisconsin Poets Calendar

The ordinary is rarer

than we think, as I walk

in early January thaw, thirty

degrees warmer than norm.

Greened grass reappears

from sand-smudged snow;

the melting invigorates

birds, alighting to feeders.

Stoic snowman melts;

his head eroding as

stick arm tilts down, and

ground absorbs this thaw.