Then, the Snow

The snow started this morning while we were at church. It was coming down in golfball-sized clumps of wet snowflakes, covering cars and grass, sticking to trees, but mostly melting on the streets. It doesn't snow much in Atlanta, so there were a succession of kids with sleds, makeshift and otherwise, going down the hills in front of Morningside Presbyterian. Iain went sledding first by himself, then played with the boys next door, and then went sledding again before finally coming inside.

I took the dog for a walk around the block while the snow was still falling heavily. Bullwinkle is a black Laborador retriever, with big feet with webbed toes. He didn't mind walking in the slush along the curb, and the large falling snow flakes made him sort of look like the opposite of a Dalmatian. The family at the corner of Cumberland and North Morningside made a great snowman. The mother told me that her children didn't know how to make a snowman, that they were leaving too much of this to her to do. I told her that was because her children lived in Atlanta, and if she wanted them to know how to make snowmen, she needed to move to Michigan. But they made a great snowman, with a scarf and a hat, a carrot nose, and figs for eyes.


It's now late afternoon and the snow is still falling, but it is not as heavy as it was earlier. The sky is gray and the gutters are full of slush and cold water. It it gets cold tonight, the city will be covered in ice tomorrow. A Sunday afternoon with snow means kids and sleds and snowmen; a Monday morning with ice is another mattter entirely. About once an hour this afternoon there has been the sound of thunder. Snow, and thunder. It's unsettling.

Iain is reading his book now, in front of the fire. I guess it is time for me to think about what we have in the house for dinner.

After the Rain

It rained yesterday - the kind of slow, soaking rain that I expect to have in Atlanta during the winter. I drove the girls to Athens yesterday morning and was in rain for entire drive there and back. It stopped around the time I got back, and I asked Iain if he wanted to try out the radar gun. He had wanted to use it Thursday night, but it was Family Science Night at Morningside Elementary, and we didn't have time.

So we got the dog and the radar gun and walked up to East Rock Springs. Iain positioned himself in line with the curbside maple trees along the edge of the Haygood parking lot, across from Sunken Garden Park, next to one of those "Slow Down" signs that PEDS has distributed around the neighborhood. He probably spent half an hour, checking the speed of cars heading towards Morningside Elementary School. The speed limit is 25 miles per hour, and there were only a few cars going that slowly - Iain said that a few drivers did wave at him, and that they generally speaking were the ones who were close to the speed limit. There were three vehicles that were going 45 or 46 miles per hour, and lots of them in between that and the speed limit.

For a few minutes I sat on the stone wall alongside the sidewalk, watching, but Bullwinkle didn't want to stay in one place, so we walked around the parking lot instead. There were lots of earthworms stretched out on the asphalt - some were dead, but most were simply in the wrong place, having come up from the drenched ground to avoid drowning, and now were stranded on a parking lot where they would be stepped on or worse.

Thursday night at Family Science Night, Iain and I had attended a session on worms, where a guy from the Hike Inn at Amicalola Falls State Park talked about using worms to get rid of vegetable waste and paper. At the Hike Inn, they have massive vats of worms that they feed table scraps, paper, and even cotton fabric to, and the worms turn it into fertilizer. Of course I knew that worms were an important part of the ecosystem, but I had never thought of them being used for commercial-scale composting. The worms in our gardens do the same kind of magic without us even noticing.

So, I picked a couple of them up and moved them to the stretch of ground between the parking lot and the driveway to the Grizzard House - a strip of ground that is thick with fallen leaves and pine straw, where hopefully earthworms would have the sense to stay and not go wandering around the parking lot. Then there were a few more, and a few more, and then I was finding them everywhere I looked - sometimes I have 4 or 5 or 6 at a time, wriggling in the palm of my hand. I must have moved 50 or 60 of them off the asphalt, while Iain was at the curb with the radar detector.

As we were leaving, he told me that I was the kind of person who would rescue earthworms. I suppose one could hear worse from one's child.