Springtime in almost Canada

Spring is beginning to pop around here. The blooming trees are showing color. The shrubs are turning green. The crocus, tulips and hyacinths are emerging. Spring is different here than other places we have lived, however. The grass in my lawn has remained green all winter long. It isn’t growing fast, but I have to mow it every couple of weeks or so now after about three months of not having to mow at all. I can’t say how, exactly, but things are different here than they are in places that have longer and more severe winter weather.

I think I’m adapting to my new climate as well. The last couple of days, when we have had partly cloudy skies, I have been commenting on how beautiful sunny weather is. The problem is that it isn’t really all that sunny. A few patches of blue sky amidst a lot of clouds don’t constitute clear skies. When we get a day without rain, and we have had several recently, I almost forget what it is like to have horizon to horizon blue skies.

I have not, however, taken to mowing my lawn in the rain. That behavior is one of the strange ones of this place. We see people mowing their lawn in the rain - and not just amateurs. We see professional lawn services mowing and trimming in the rain. Just a week or so ago, I saw the crew of a lawn service working in a neighborhood lawn with mowers, trimmers, and even a leaf blower. I can’t imagine that grass clippings blow well when they are soggy from the rain. And I’m not just talking about a light sprinkle. The workers of the lawn service were wearing rain jackets and at least one of them had on rain pants as well. They knew it was raining.

Another practice that is very strange to me is that roofers continue to work in the rain. Across the street from our house is a home that is being substantially rebuilt after a major fire. Last October, crews removed trusses and the house was down to bare stud walls. Through the winter they have worked steadfastly and the house is not completely weathered in. There are signs that interior work is going well. Along the way, I watched as a roofing crew was putting on shingles. When it started to rain, I expected the crew to be pulled off of the roof, but they continued until they were finished. Most of the members of the crew were wearing safety harnesses, but still it seems like the risk of injury seemed to outweigh the rush to complete in my opinion. I kept thinking about a statistic that I used to cite to the families of newly sworn deputies: line of duty deaths are more common among roofers than law enforcement officers. Fortunately, no one was injured in the shingling of the house in our neighborhood. Again last week, I saw a roofing crew up on a roof putting on shingles in the rain.

I joke that the locals don’t know when it is raining, but that isn’t really true. You will occasionally see someone in a rain jacket when it isn’t raining, but it is fairly rare. Most of the time it takes a good downpour to get the locals to gear up.

Yesterday, however, the weather was good. It didn’t rain and it was warm enough to take a walk in our shirtsleeves. We were in Mount Vernon, the town where we rented a home for the first year after we moved out here. Mount Vernon has a beautiful walking path along the riverfront through its downtown section. There are high and effective flood walls along the river and last November those flood walls were needed to protect the city as the Skagit River set new records for streamflow. We noted that the water level in the river was 14 feet lower yesterday than it was at the crest of the flood, and tried to imagine what it was like when such a huge volume of water was flowing by, just a few feet beneath the bridge that is now high above the water level. There is a lot of work being done to repair flood damage. We could see areas where rock had been hauled in by the army corps of engineers to shore up the river bank. A large crane on a barge was at work setting new pilings on barriers erected to deflect logs from slamming into the bridge that crosses the river in the downtown area. Not related to the flooding, the riverwalk was being extended and we were able to walk on some newly installed pathway.

One of the interesting things we saw were the planters alongside the river. Mount Vernon is tulip country and there are fields of tulips surrounding the town. Along the riverwalk there are planters with trees and flowers. In those planters all of the tulips were crowded on the side of the planter away from the river. When the river flooded last fall it must have rearranged the bulbs beneath the ground. Everything was soaked and when it dried out the bulbs were all washed up against the edges of the planters, so that is the way they came up this spring.

I spoke on the phone with a friend in Minnesota who reported that their snow was almost all gone, reminding me that the mild winters around here are not the weather that a lot of people experience. I do miss the snow, but I really can’t complain. This is a good place to live and we have found the adjustment to our place to be easy. It isn’t bad only having a couple of days of slippery roads each winter. We didn’t have to rearrange our travel plans for winter storms at all, though we did have to alter our route a couple of times due to flood damage to roads.

I’m not fully acclimated to this place yet, however. I still refuse to mow my lawn in the rain. I don’t intend to change my ways, either.

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