Where Did Winter Go?

  The "Big Thaw" has come to the Bayou.  After three whole days of cold...at least cold by Bayou standards, our ice has melted and we are looking at weather more usual for the area.  Our cool spells never last more than a few days max, then we are back to rain and warm temperatures.  The ice is a novelty, however, and folks get real excited when they see it.  Most of the time, we have sleet...not snow but it will never fail to be heard "Snow!!! We are getting snow!!"  Nope...ice...we are getting sleet.  There is a vast difference.  Snow is pretty.  Ice is slippery.  Enough said.

  Like I said, the ice started melting this morning and now is a thing of the past...a mere memory that is fast slipping from the mind.  This morning, while on the pier, Mark and I found that our fishing buckets were frozen with about a three inch slab of ice.  Cool!  Ice is one of those things that intrigues me.  Take a liquid, add cold air and you have a solid. In this case, we had a solid with lots of bubbles.  The wind might have had something to do with that since the water was being churned with every gust.  Now, take that solid, add sunshine and you have the liquid back again.  The ice melted and dripped all over the pier boards.

  Tonight sees us much warmer but the rains will come again.  If you recall, my cutting of the persimmon seeds during the end of October revealed spoons...lots of spoons!  I was a tad confused by this as spoons supposedly mean rain or snow by the folklore method of predicting the coming winter.  I was beginning to doubt the veracity of my seeds.  Surely we could not be having THAT much precipitation this winter.  Well, we have.  December saw far above the average and January has exceeded that already.  Spoons do not lie...persimmon seeds do not lie.  I wonder what the rest of January and then February and March have in store for us.  Rain?  Ice?  Why not snow???