All That Snow Shoveling, Gone

 "Ah, it finally nice out. An' tasty bugs I eat. Da flies, day juicy," said Darlusz Zabagaiski, the Polish frog that lives with me here in St. Albans, Vermont, who says he's my muse.

Me standing next to a snowbank I shoveled, with
Darlusz the frog over my left shoulder, in Feb.

I was doing yard work yesterday in the 65 degree sunshine, watching the last of the snow melt and the buds finally begin to swell on the trees. There's even hints of green on some warm, sunny patches of my lawn.

"You shovel da snow all winter, and for what? It all go. Why you bother," Dalusz said, sipping a Diet Coke to wash down an early season mosquito. He was next to remnants of what had been an immense snow bank this past winter.

Well, we had to get out of the driveway this winter. You expected us to hibernate all winter,?" I asked the frog.

"Yes," was his response.

My shoulder is still killing me from hefting snow onto what was an eight or nine foot snowbank at the spot where Darlusz was resting. Now, it was just a tiny, dirty patch of snow, destined to disappear in hours under the onslaught of 65 degree air and sunshine.

 The same snowbank yesterday, with Darlusz, after most of it
melted in the warm spring weather.

"Lots of things that take work go away. You have to deal with it," I told Darlusz.

"It OK, he said. You make snowbank, it melt, dare's water, da bugs grow dare, and I have da lunch," Darlusz said, smiling.