It’s the dismal season


We went for a walk at Glacial Lakes State Park today, and we’re in the unpleasant in-betweens: the snow is gone, it was a pleasant 20°C, but everything is dead brown. Behold the majestic natural beauty of Minnesota in the spring time!

glaciallakes

Also, we walked around that body of water, which is called “Mountain Lake”. There are no mountains here. The elevation is 371 meters. Oh, Minnesotans…

Comments

  1. anteprepro says

    In my humble opinion, there is a certain muted beauty to the dull golden color of the dead brown. It’s serene, in a different way. (Autumn is my favorite season so that is probably related).

  2. chigau (違う) says

    Yeah. It’s like that here, too.
    Fortunately, the internets do not convey the smell of a winter’s accumulation of dogshit

    thawing.

  3. Josh, Official SpokesGay says

    I was making the same remarks to my housemate the other day. Vermont looks precisely the same. It’s like a sere, dystopian wasteland. Not one single bud.

  4. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    That was us two weeks ago. Now the spring flowers are beginning to appear, and the grass shows signs of turning green.

  5. says

    According to the city’s website it’s not even a natural lake. You’d better get to Wisconsin to get a view of our brown sticks. They have tiny green dots on them. I think they’re Emerald Ash Borer beetles…

  6. chigau (違う) says

    Actually, the lilacs are just starting to bud.
    And the dandelions are doing just fine.

  7. unclefrogy says

    having spent much of my life in southern california,
    brown grass hills seems normal it is less often green and lush at least in memory, though the trees mostly have leaves, and there are plenty of small creatures about.
    uncle frogy

  8. Menyambal says

    Southern Missouri has dogwood blossoms, redbuds, and l0new green leaves on most trees. I had to mow the back yard yesterday, for the first time and was ‘way late in the doing of it. The daffodils are mostly past. I planted a redbud today – had it in the fridge too long, probably. Lovely thunderstorm this morning.

    (I really dislike that brown time of year. Around here it is much of the winter.)

  9. roachiesmom says

    Looks good to me, too.

    I have truckloads of unwanted heat, green and tree sperm here, if anyone can figure out how to trade me some lovely cold, grey weather. No rain, though, have plenty, thanks.

  10. cicely says

    Ugly, nekkid, dead-looking winter trees.
    :(
    Spring is my season—especially last-weekish, with redbuds bloomed out everywhere and the Bradford pears covered in white flowers.

  11. says

    You don’t like the sound of walking through dry, dead grass? I think it sounds great.

    It beats the heck out of the end-of-winter days where I used to live in Canada. Until the grass grew to solidify the ground and things dried, it was mud everywhere if you left paved roads and paths.

  12. chigau (違う) says

    Rob Grigjanis#12
    from your link
    “Co co rico co co rico”
    Holy ffff
    the McKenzie Brothers were quoting T.S. Eliot.

  13. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    I love it when the trees show their bones.

    That fractal beauty, stark against the sky, speaks to me in whispers of deep, deep time. Something about that pattern, almost but not quite within my understanding, makes me think of my place in the history of our biology. Awe and joy fill me, in equal measure, because why I should be so lucky as to be alive right here right now? Why should I have a brain capable, however dimly, of understanding the incredible passage of time that allowed that brain to be? And then spring comes, the branches don their summer clothes, and I get on with living this one and only life.

  14. Akira MacKenzie says

    Autumn through spring is the most depressing half of the year for me. Indeed the Summer Solstice only reminds me that the days are going to start getting shorter a shorter until all the world is cold, dead, dark.

    Oh, to live in a world of perpetual warm, green, life instead of this frozen waste.

  15. Akira MacKenzie says

    Autumn through spring is the most depressing half of the year for me. Indeed the Summer Solstice only reminds me that the days are going to start getting shorter and shorter until all the world is once again cold, dead, and dark.

    Oh, to live in a world of perpetually warm, green, alive instead of this frozen waste.

  16. Rey Fox says

    Jeez, enough singing the praises of skeletal trees already. You’ve had at least five months of that.

    It’s late April. It’s LEAVES time.

  17. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    Jeez, enough singing the praises of skeletal trees already. You’ve had at least five months of that.

    Nope. The leaves have only just begun to turn here. It’s late April, It’s PHILOSOPHISING time.

  18. David Rutten says

    I was born near a place called “berg en dal”, went to school at a place called “amersfoortse berg”, and spend a uni semester doing a project in “bergen op zoom”. Berg is Dutch for mountain. There are no mountains for 1000 km in any direction.

  19. Menyambal says

    There is yellow pollen enough to leave tracks in, and one of the trees is putting out white fluff that is accumulating in little drifts, and the attic fan pulls it against the window screens.

    I like seeing the structure of the earth when the land is bare, but by golly, when the life around here wakes up, it is almost scarily impressive.

    (Except the Bradford pears. They look like Styrofoam balls. The dogwoods look like Japanese art.)

  20. raefn says

    It’s gray and brown and muddy up here in Maine. However, the birdhouse outside my kitchen window has chickadees moving in, and a male cardinal is alternating between dining at my bird feeder, chirping quietly as he does so, and then singing loudly from high up in a tall conifer in my yard. The lack of leaves does make it easier to birdwatch, so it does have its benefits.

  21. Nick Gotts says

    Here in Turin spring is fully sprung. On Tuesday I go to Scotland for a 3-week stay, primarily for the UK general election, but I should get a second spring while I’m there!

  22. says

    Urgh, I hat that time of year. Winter is over but everything is bleak, bleak, bleak. Luckily, that was 3 weeks ago and during the last week the hill behind our house has been getting greener by the day.
    Have a lovely flower. That was yesterday.

    David Rutten
    There’s the anecdote of my grandparents’ holiday in northern Germany. They’d been advised to go to the XXX mountains. When they came back, they were asked how they liked them. They said they couldn’t find them. They walked up a hill like the one they lived on and then they could only see flat plains as far as they could see.

  23. congenital cynic says

    Is PZ a closet Canadian? Quoting temperatures in degrees C and elevations in Metres? So unamerican.

    Somewhat dismal here in eastern Canada too. But there are buds on the trees, so it will start to green up in a week or two.

    I also find the period of dirty snow that ends winter and the dead brown vegetation that starts spring a bit dismal. But the sun is warm when it’s shining, and that feels good. Green things are on the move because of it.

  24. carlie says

    NY is running late this year, but yesterday I went out and found some skunk cabbage and Carolina spring beauties in flower and ramps coming up. As for planted ornamentals, we have some daffodils and squills flowering. Not a lot of any of them, but it’s more than I thought would be out. I swear I think I heard some spring peepers too, but I think it’s a little early for them.

  25. macallan says

    Also, we walked around that body of water, which is called “Mountain Lake”. There are no mountains here. The elevation is 371 meters. Oh, Minnesotans…

    Florida has Highlands County. Named ‘after the terrain’. In the flatter-than-a-pancake part of the state.

  26. carlie says

    Whoops, it’s been too long since last year. What looked at a distance like Carolina spring beauties were really hepatica. That’s embarrassing. Also, today there is now coltsfoot blooming too.

    Fortunately, the internets do not convey the smell of a winter’s accumulation of dogshit

    thawing.

    Yeah, i made the mistake of going for a walk a couple of weeks ago on a nice day near the end of snow melt, on a busily-walked street. Ugh.

  27. carolw says

    Here in Austin, TX, it’s alternating between pollen falls and thunderstorms. Warm and breezy today. My little cacti on the patio are growing new buds, after I thought I had about killed them in a freeze.

  28. Menyambal says

    The cats are in the open window, watching the world. A few maple seeds just went twisting down.

  29. Akira MacKenzie says

    “Is PZ a closet Canadian? Quoting temperatures in degrees C and elevations in Metres?”

    More likely PZ uses metric because he’s a scientist.

  30. cicely says

    FossilFishy, if you’re gonna get all poetic on us in appreciation of fractally nekkid trees, I will inflict upon you an assault I first delivered to/on/at the aesthetic sensibilites of an unsuspecting—albeit small—public, about 5-ish years ago…a thing I called…
    The Bleakening
     
    The unclouded sun
    Gives off neither heat nor light
    To my inward eye.
     
    The dead-looking trees
    Clutch with their naked fingers
    At the frigid sky.
     
    The blackbirds squabble
    Over a greasy french fry
    In the withered grass.
     
    Icy car windows
    Only emphasize the fact
    That winter will come.
     
    No resolution–
    Autumn quenches my spirits
    Routinely, every year.

     
    *folding arms and scowling*
    So there!
    Neener!

  31. says

    I miss my snow already. But early spring is okay, in its way. It’s got this muted cheeriness around here. Small burrowing and scurrying and flitting things waking up everywhere, and you can almost hear the plants pushing up from beneath the leaf litter. It’s a bit bare, sure, but there’s lots of light, and you know it’ll all be green in weeks. And it’s a nice temperature, too, between the absurd extremes.

  32. johnhodges says

    I live in the mountains of Virginia. In Spring here there is a particular time of year, about now or a bit earlier, when you can watch the Earth turn. (1) the weather is warm enough that you can stand comfortably motionless outdoors, and (2) the trees are still bare. You go out at dusk, when the sky is still a little light but the stars are out, and stand looking up through the bare branches of a tree. Pick a star, and watch it for ten or fifteen minutes, see it move through the branches.