Chipping Ice on a Warm Winter Day

There is something special about February sunlight. I notice it  year after year. This year that glorious presence announced itself with a bang, after two weeks of uninterrupted gloom.

Hilary and I tried to make the most of it this weekend by exploring some out-of-the-way parks. We skied on Saturday morning at Lebanon Hills, parking at the west exit on Pilot Knob Road and skiing west under the highway and off into the wooded hills. The trails are typical two-track classic trails, somewhat narrow, and this being our first visit, we walked down three or four steep hills that disappeared out of sight around a bend. Good call.

On Sunday morning before breakfast I noticed a largish bird at the edge of the woods with his back turned to us, tail bobbing slightly. By the time I'd found my binoculars, it had turned in my direction. It was a cooper's hawk calmly tearing chunks off of flesh off a female cardinal.

Scenes like this remind me how much humanity and cuteness I tend to project on these beautiful but self-centered creatures.

The temperature was 43 degrees by 9 a.m. when we left the house to hike some trails at a park we'd never been to before north of Elk River. Blue sky, white snow, fresh air, shadows in the woods. Very nice.

On our way back to town we took a detour to Crow-Hassan Park, south of St. Michael, where there's always a good chance you'll see a rough-legged hawk sitting in a bare tree on the county road going in. Once again, we did. We hiked out into the fields for a while, relishing the silence and the empty, grass-covered fields. There were horses in the parking lot by the time we got back to the car, and people with exotic, uncontrollable dogs.

When we got home, I still hadn't gotten enough of the balmy atmosphere, and I decided to chip away at the sheet of ice at the end of the driveway. Perhaps you'll accuse me of setting the bar rather low, but I find this activity to be one of the most satisfying on earth. Why? Because when the weather turns warm, the sheet of ice becomes soft, and it doesn't take much effort to chop off a big piece from above, or slide the blade of your shovel underneath and pry loose a handsome continent.

But there are also perturbations involved. As you liberate a chunk and toss it aside, a stream of water rushes in to fill the gap, and you begin to wonder if there will be a new chuck of ice just as thick as the one you removed in the same place tomorrow morning. Then again, you begin to wonder whether, if you didn't do anything at all, the ice would melt anyway by sundown, rendering your efforts superfluous.

To counter these dark thoughts, I remind myself that superfluous or not, I'm enjoying this little project. When I no longer enjoy it, I'll stop doing it. But I struggle with the nagging suspicion that if I could only break through the thick dike of ice right here at the edge of driveway, the water would all drain away and I'd be set for the rest of the winter.

Our final expedition, after all that labor, was to a third distant corner of the city, to a concert given by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra at the St. Andrews Lutheran megachurch on the outskirts of Mahtomedi. I grew up in that village—back when St. Andrew's was a modest church on Mahtomedi Avenue—and I spent a few minutes in the lobby of the  attractive new structure on the outskirts of town examining faces and trying to bend them to my  memories: "Is that Tony Konkler? Can that be Meta Jensen? Boy, they've changed!" Of course, the likelihood that someone from my class might happen to attend this particular performance, much less that I'd actually recognize them, was nil. But at a certain point in life, everyone starts to look vaguely like someone you used to know.

I did become reacquainted with one old friend during the performance: Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Hearing it live for perhaps the first time, I was impressed. But the performance also reconfirmed my long-standing opinion that the piece has absolutely nothing to do with the seasons. Each of the four "movements" is made up of  several sections that vary widely in mood and tempo. The "Spring" section doesn't sound at all like spring, and "Winter" isn't particularly wintry. I don't know why the people who write program notes continue to offer us that crock of cut cork. Maybe it's because they know audiences like to have something concrete to hold onto in the midst of such mercurial shifts in mood. Or maybe in Venice the seasons are all pretty much alike. Perhaps we should just chalk it up, once again, to romantic projection.