This morning, May 2

When I was a very little girl, a very little boy hung a paper cone of flowers on my front doorknob one May Day morning, knocked timidly and ran away.

He only ran as far as the bottom step, where he tripped and sprawled. When my mother answered the door, she overlooked the flowers and saw only the bloody boy. No one was unduly alarmed. Accidents like that happened all the time. Our house was the Koolaid HQ where all the neighborhood children gathered. Blood flowed frequently, but all our ills could be cured with Sylvester and Tweety Band-Aids.

In my mind, though, he was a brave knight who'd collapsed at my feet, or something like that. I was in love. I had been charmed by a handful of limp flowers stolen from neighborhood gardens.

I no longer remember the little boy's name. He moved away before we started school and I haven't seen him since. 

I do, however, remember the flowers. I distinctly remember that the construction-paper cone (thank you, Captain Kangaroo!) contained tulips, iris, daffodils and lilacs. On the first of May, those flowers are supposed to be blooming merrily against a backdrop of emerald-green grass.

Not snow. Definitely not snow.

On Wednesday, we had 75 mph winds. They stripped the blossoms off my fruit trees and sent them swirling somewhere in the direction of Nebraska. No plums, no cherries, no apricots, no pears, no peaches, no apples, no currants, no chokecherries this year. The crabapples (being barely edible) always survive, but this year I think even they are gone.

Then the ice storm came. It encased everything, even the early flowers in beds I'd so carefully sheltered. The forsythia is brown and limp. The barely-visible lilac buds turned black. 

Ice was followed by snow, too heavy for any plant with leaves to support. Branches came crashing down. The corkscrew willow, its tiny leaves still no bigger than spruce needles, split in half. A limb at the top of the ponderosa came loose and took out every branch underneath it, for 60 feet on down. 

For the next three nights, temperatures dropped into the teens. The 2-inch peonies were frozen so solid that when my dog tromped through them, they broke off very neatly at ground level. Even the rhubarb froze back to the ground. And all that's at home, at 6,200 feet. Here at the church, at 9,000 feet, all is blindingly white.

The path from the teeny-tiny house to the church door, maybe 75 feet long during the summer, has grown to 14 miles. Every time I shovel, it grows longer. 

Spring is coming. The sky is blue this morning. I cling to belief. But sweetie, if you're reading his, you might pick up some flowers on the way home. You don't need to run after you drop them off. As long as the sun is shining, it's probably safe to come on in.

And to the person whose recent satire included a jab at people who write about weather, come visit. You can shovel next time. After seven months of winter, you might find it's a defining feature of your life too.