With teeter-totter temperatures and the sun’s steepening late winter angle, the skin of snow that’s been covering the ground most of the season is rapidly burning away. Retreating like miniature glaciers, snow patches face a liquid oblivion, soaking into half frozen ground and running down pavement until finding a catch basin or leaking into a wetland at the road’s edge.
I admit watching snow melt is a bit strange and not the most exciting preoccupation, but it’s not like I’m fixated on it for any length of time or taking precision measurements. I’m merely focusing the usual casual glance while running an errand to the post office or grocery, filling my bird feeder or walking down the street for a coffee at LaSalle Market. Call it an offhand way of practicing mindfulness if you need a justification, but there’s an untapped beauty in this ever-changing and quickly disappearing form of natural performance art that we see year-in-and-year-out, but rarely look at.
Maybe the receding snow illustrates something about the micro climate of our neighborhoods that is otherwise invisible. Contrasting with the faded brown and dun-colored bare ground, we’re left with a visually discontinuous and disjoint landscape that boggles the eyes with a peculiar allure.
Except for the north sides of buildings and hills where storm remains lie thickest and last longest, thinning snow patches decorate the ground in unusual curves and linear patterns, amoeba shapes and geometric oddities. These are nature’s white Rorschach blots, fingerprints of sunlight and wind showing where gusts piled snow and the warm light of day has penetrated to melt it. Soon only the massive mounds left by plows and payloaders in parking lots will remind us of winter, and spring will cure us of any crazy fascination we have with melting snow.
