Snow blanket

Now that it's nearly spring—or at least there's more daylight and puddles everywhere—apparently I am eager to recap winter.

If memory serves me, the Twin Cities really had only one or two significant snowstorms this winter (though March isn't over yet). But because it was so cold all winter, everything stuck around and piled up (and I mean piled up).

And I got used to it, and because there weren't very many big, big snowfalls, I'd forget how much snow  was on the ground. (Until Wish would try to walk across a drift and plunge through snow cover that turned out to be taller than he was, which happened more than once.) The only really clear reminder of the snow depth were the little outdoor landmarks that got swallowed: the benches, the signs, the bikes.

I got a weird kick out of seeing those reminders this winter. The snow blanket is melting fast now, so I thought I'd collect a few examples before it's gone.

If you dropped by the blog on Monday, you saw these little benches without benches at the Lake Harriet Bandshell:

An Adirondack chair on a patio that's not quite ready for warm-weather lounging:

From over the weekend: that bar is the top of a bench.

And from after that big snowfall a few weeks back: the little stubs are the tops of the fence stakes around our community garden.

(Hard to picture? Here's what they looked like in the spring!)

I wondered at first why I was collecting these odd photos of things like buried Adirondack chairs—and then I figured out that these funny sights speak to my love of seeing these neighborhoods, one detail at a time, in every season.