Snow-covered bird nest within the crown of the weeping Mulberry

 What a sight to assail sleep-blurred, morning eyes.  Heavy, white snow clouding the landscape, with an overnight accumulation that sat there, glowering at us.  Hardly to be expected when just a few days ago we were in shirt-sleeves.  When, ambling through the ravine on our daily walk, the heat of the sun bore down so ferociously, even with bare arms we felt over-heated.

And wondered at the presence of so many red Admirals; we had never seen so many early-spring butterflies before.  They were whirling through the atmosphere, alongside the early and expected Mourning Cloaks.  Naturalists later explained that this new phenomenon was wide-spread throughout Ontario, caused serendipitously by a milder-than-normal winter that allowed the cocoons' inhabitants to make it through the winter, and to blossom forth into these early arrivals.  They warned too, that a late-season frost could kill off those fluttering orange-and-black beauties.  And so it did.

One can only pity the robins which had sung so enthusiastically, bursting with life and welcoming spring; how downcast they must now be.  And the juncos that had constructed a nest inside the crown of the deeply-branched weeping Mulberry adjacent our deck; how despairing they must be at this turn of events.

But then, I have memory of the emerging crimson buds of our plentifully-flowering magnolia tree being weighted down with late-season snow, on other occasions, during other emerging springs.  We tend to feel we are experiencing alarming new anomalies of nature, attributing them to the uncertainties associated with Climate Change, but in fact this simply demonstrates how fragile the seasons can be in their presentations, merging from one to the next.

Snow-burdened crimson-coloured blossom-buds of the Magnolia

As that old saying goes ... this too shall pass.