Tuesday's Tribulations, UPDATED

It's 29 degrees at the ol' homestead, with a wind chill in the low 20s. It has snowed on five of the last six days. Easter Sunday was mostly sunny, although the temp never got above 37°. But then yesterday we awoke to two more inches of snow, and it snowed again last night.

UPDATE: we woke up to 5" more, this morning.

05:50 today - five inches of fresh snow. Apparently a micro-burst, as the local news hasn't even mentioned it.

I wanted to write a bit about how the sun glistens on the icy crystals in the snow - how it looks like someone scattered tiny diamonds across the yard. I wanted to mention the hoar frost on the car windows, and how they resemble tiny paintings of snowflakes, as if done by elves in the night. But it's April, and isn't that cold any longer. The snow, at times a wet, sloppy mess, has come and gone, and then returned. We've had well over a foot of snowfall in the last week, but the daytime temps rise above freezing, and most of it melted. AccuHunch has forecast "partly sunny" for today, with temps once again reaching that persistent 37 degrees. 

We've had a number of cool, wet summers, and 2008 was among the coldest "summers" ever recorded here. We had rain almost daily, and as a result many long-time Alaskans were suddenly, seriously, discussing the possibility of moving away.

If you've never visited Alaska, you must understand that our rich payment for surviving the cold, dark winters is the long hours of daylight in the all-too-brief summer months. A day consisting of nearly 22 hours of sunlight must be experienced, I believe, by everyone - a truly glorious thing. At such times, the mere five hours of winter daylight in December seems worlds away.

Last summer, unfortunately, we had a lot of grey and rain, which left us all a bit crazed and longing for the sun. When the sun comes back out, we raise all the blinds just to catch what we can of the light; no matter that it's still quite cold. We'll turn up the furnace if we must, but we crave the sun.

Without the sun, all is merely grey and cold. Still, the mountains glowing a brilliant white in the sunlight are breath-taking, and the frost-covered trees - when the sun is shining - have an ethereal beauty all their own.

So cry, Excelsior! and keep the blinds open, for the sun may come back, and we don't want to miss a minute of it. If there's a bright side (you'll pardon the pun) to all this, it's that our days are already well in excess of 15 hours of light, and it's not so cold in April. But we still crave the sunlight.

If you have a sunny day, praise God for it - and if you haven't, praise God anyway, for He made the sun to give us light, and it's but a pale reflection of His own.

In His light, then, be blessed and happy, and enjoy the day.