Gloomy Weather Can Be Beautiful

Here in Vermont, we've been stuck in one of those end of winter weather funks, where it stays damp, cloudy and gloomy. Some wet snow splats down from time to time, or some cold raindrops. The sky is always gray and fog waxes and wanes, obsuring the landscape one minute, partially revealing it another.


It thaws a little during the day, and the meltwater sort of hangs in the air as mist. At night, it gets colder and a bit of slushy or icy snow greets us each morning. The brief daytime thaws have left bare brown patches here in there in the ragged carpet of dirty, thin, soggy snow.

The mild weather, at least compared to the heart of winter, rouses the skunks, who spray randomly or get hit by cars  as they wander in their groggy, sleepy stupor. The acrid smell of skunk hangs in the foggy air, so what we have is a bit of a skunk smog.

All this, of course,  is a sign of spring, that winter is losing its grip. This makes most of us happy but the gloomy air seems designed to contain our excitement about the change of season, so we don't get excerssivelly excited about it.



There's certainly a beauty in the mist, the clouds, the thawing snow, the mud underfoot, as you can see by the photographs I took in Burlington, Vermont this week that are in this post.

 Everything looks mysterious. It's as if spring knows it wants to put on its bright, green gaudy show, but what's to keep everything under wraps in the mist, so we don't get ahead of ourselves and embrace spring before it's time to do so.