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Michigan Winter
Wed Mar 12, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook.
Facing the end of another Michigan winter, Weather Notebook commentator Melissa Ingells today
finds faith and belief in melting snow and in a rediscovered garden.
We get a strange look in our eyes here,
somewhere around the end of March,
when the ground is porous like bread in a rain,
and everywhere are piles of dirt-flecked snow,
premature granite headstones to a season that won't die...
We get that look,
even the young ones, and say,
"Michigan winter," as if it were some epic
we've passed by word of mouth through generations,
some epic that explains us,
that we all know by heart.
We live here only by our faith in movement,
the same faith that keeps us driving through the fog
that comes when rain hits old snow,
driving balanced on the highbeams
that pull us along.
Our only assurance is that time has passed before,
that we've never caught our front bumper
on a drift that refused to melt.
After all, faith is only
a dream that we're willing to work for--
it clings to our garden tools the first day out,
and we forget last year's failed crops because
we need the new ones so badly.
Somehow, promise still lives in the mud and dead cornstalks
of last year's harvest. "Michigan winter," we say,
knowing that spring has never refused us yet.
And so, we sniff the air for changes,
put away the sidewalk salt,
and buy our seed packets of carrots and zucchini
like small forty-nine cent bundles of belief.
Melissa Ingells comes to us from WKAR in East Lansing, Michigan. The Weather Notebook is
underwritten by Subaru, The Beauty of All-Wheel Drive, with major funding provided by the
National Science Foundation.
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