Winter Browns...

After two months of snow, sleet, ice, and other assorted global warming, a weekend of melting is upon us. Temperatures are in the mid-40s, the sky is clear, and the sound of water dripping off of every elevated surface fills the air. It's a welcome sound, as roofs groan under the weight of the snow and ice fills the gutters to the brim.

The problem with the melting is that the resplendent veneer of new-fallen snow is stripped away, revealing the muck and mire of winter.

We're fortunate to live on a side street with little traffic. The main streets of even our sleepy little burg are lined with brown muck; snow caked with months of road salt, sand, and grime that has yet to be swept clear by man or nature. Storm drains are covered by snow and ice, and the melted water slowly absorbs back in the snowbanks as the temperature drops.

Brown is the color of the day; brown trees, stripped of their leaves for months now, thrust their naked branches to the sky, devoid of the devices by which they receive life-giving water and sun. The roadside, a repository of grit and dirt, turns a dirty brown that will linger until the rains of spring wash the earth clean yet again.

It's this time that weighs heavily on a man's heart; spring seems an eternity away, the winter months languishing under a cover of gray snow and treacherous ice. It's this time that brings about the phenomenon of cabin fever; tempers grow short; fuses even shorter. Being trapped in close proximity with little hope of getting out for months and months does strange things, makes people crazy. Days are short, with many leaving for work in the dark and returning in the same way.

In a few long months, the snow will finally melt; signs of life will return; daylight creeps back in around the edges of the day. Tempers will relax; fuses will lengthen; the flames of discontent will snuff and blaze no more. But for now, the brown plague rules the roost, a blanket of blah across the land. These truly are the times that try men's souls; with naught but a palette of gray and dirty brown landscape as far as the eye can see.

Needless to say, this calls for beer.

That is all.