White or Wet?

Yes. Both white AND wet. This is the earliest in the year that I’ve come to Jerome Creek, and it’s snowing, but it’s only just hovering around freezing, and the ground is so super-saturated that White Trash Creek, normally a narrow, gravelly, dry ditch bisecting the yard, is a raging torrent of 33-degree water. It snowed during my last darkening hour of drive out here on Wednesday evening, from 7pm to 8pm and Colfax to here; it continued to snow through yesterday morning; and even though it stopped for much of the day yesterday, it started up again last night, and is falling now. K&A were THRILLED to be getting away from it to head off to Australia for a couple weeks, and I can understand why. This winter was not one in which I spent many long days soaking up the sun in the southern hemisphere (Kenya in November and December was pretty chilly, actually, for being an equatorial place), and I’m feeling, like most Northwesterners, as if I’ve been huddled under a damp rock for several months: stiff from the cold, half-alive, moldy, and blue-pale. My friend L charmingly pointed out my silvering temples at lunch Wednesday before I hit the road, and I realized that my latest haircut had removed the last blond ends from my hair, thus removing the last gray-hair camouflage from my year of sun, Nov 09-Nov 10, when I spent northern winters in the southern sun of Valparaiso, the Seychelles, and Australia, and of course northern summers back home. It turns out I like having a tan, and baby-blond hair. And a marrow-deep warmth.

Dogs and I had a long, slow slog through the snow yesterday, which was not without its joys (I will be posting pics on Picasa), particularly for them. Sadie kept thrusting her snout deep into the snow, presumably searching for ground squirrels just like in the summer. Hoover ran hither and thither, seemingly in slow motion as he flowed through the snow like a dolphin, arching in and out of drifts. Spackle and Tessa lumbered around, large Labrador grins on their faces. Tessa threw herself to the ground in several places and gave herself serious backrubs, and even though the ground was 99.99% white, managed to come home with a mousse of something smelly giving her neck a spikey style. Spackle had not done well with yesterday’s slightly different breakfast food, puking it all up (much of it un-chewed) before we took our walk, but he seemed to have enough energy for our outing. All dogs have been MUCH more sedate this morning (particularly Tessa, who had a long night of warning us about invaders as snow warmed and slid off the metal roof).

I did make a trip in to Moscow yesterday to replace Spackle’s lamb, rice, AND VEGETABLE food with pure lamb and rice, which is what he eats at home and what he tolerates most easily, and I managed to buy an awesome pair of Wrangler’s at Tri-State, Idaho’s Most Interesting Store. Spackle managed to keep down both dinner and, so far, breakfast, so I’m hopeful I won’t have any more huge piles of puke to clean up. I won’t be doing any riding until I can at least see a road surface, so everyone keep your fingers crossed for some sun!

Photos here.