Morning Thanks--Hope and faith when it's all you got

Residents of the Home claim that when judged by the winter of '36, or that monster of '75, the storm we had Saturday night and Sunday was little more than a frisky pup. It snowed, sure. And it blew. For sure.  And what was left when finally the whole thing blew away covered the ground. Again. 

Still, I'm not ready to call what we got last weekend a blizzard, even though I'll concede it came close. When it was over, our  backyard was embellished by ornamentation left behind, as Emerson said, by "the great artificer," which is transcendentalese for "the Creator of heaven and earth." Was it beautiful? Okay, yes. Gorgeous? No. Had all that fancy alabaster adorned the backyard in late November, it would have truly been "astonished art" (Emerson again). But in mid-April, for the second weekend in a row, ain't nobody ready to ooh and aah at eight spanking new inches of snow.

Friends of ours stopped over late afternoon when the gusts were still blowing themselves out. We sat upstairs, surrounded by winter, and one of them looked out the window, "Hey, the snow's going sideways," he said. He wasn't seeing things. What fell didn't fall. We didn't have much snow at all on the front lawn, but a three-foot drift snaked, west to east, the entire width of the house and garage. Interesting maybe, but in mid-April, no longer "astonishing."

Here's this morning's weather news. Read it and weep.

We're in the throes of "the endless winter." It's not a horror, and I don't think it yet deserves some dystopian screenplay, but it's driving people plain crazy.

Three to six inches tomorrow; temps in the forties--at best!--all week. Woe and woe.

It's a chore not to despair. 

But change will come. A week and a half from now, forecasters say, the temps will scratch themselves up to the low seventies. But then you can't trust a weatherman any more than you can a politician. 

Change will come--keep saying it. Someday soon, we'll walk out back and start chopping off last year's shrunken stalks and seeing precious little green nubbins poking their way up and out of all that death. It'll happen. Have faith. This too shall pass.

This morning's thanks are for the very real promise that winter will finally someday soon actually end. It will. Call him or her what you will--the fierce artificer or Mother Nature or Wankan Tanka or the Creator of Heaven and Earth. He'll come through.

Every morning, I'm thankful for faith, maybe especially today, with six inches coming again.