Oregon springs from winter

Photo of back yard taken last fall, with granddog, Milo.

Before moving to the Northwest from Wisconsin in 1999, I talked to a former coworker who had moved to Portland several years earlier. “Don’t the winters get to you?” I asked. She replied, “It’s not as if you live in Arizona.”

Indeed, that first winter on the Olympic Peninsula was a pleasant surprise. The rain didn’t come until November, and then, for the most part, only on work days. Just about every weekend was sunny. Incredible. And, I now realize, very unusual.

Wisconsin has a few more days of sun than Oregon or Washington. The sunlight is scattered, however, throughout the year. In the Northwest, sun is concentrated in the summer. It can sometimes go for two months without rain, or even many clouds to speak of. But winter. Well, it does get cloudy. And rainy. There are compensations. Here in Oregon’s mild Willamette Valley, it seldom freezes. Ponds and lakes fill up with wintering waterfowl. I can drive a mile and see hundreds of swans. Or I can drive north of Seattle and see thousands of them. I can drive to the coast and see wintering loons.

I remember that first winter in Washington, 1999-2000. I was at work. It was February. My office faced woods. I heard a motor, like a snow blower or a lawnmower. It couldn’t be a snow blower. There wasn’t any snow. I got up and walked down the hall to look out another window. Someone was cutting the grass. In February. What brave new world had I landed in?

Today is February 12. I worked for a couple of hours in my very compact but lovely backyard. This year, we’ve had some pretty cold weather by our standards. Shallow ponds and flooded fields froze for a week. The geranium I always plant in honor of an old friend had green on it until the latest deep freeze. The petunias still have some green. But the snapdragons in the window box have buds. The heather is in bloom. And the daffodil and tulip bulbs popping through are hardly worth mentioning. But I will mention it because I spent so many years in Wisconsin. A beautiful place, to be sure, with cardinals and indigo buntings and scarlet tanagers—and lots of winter snow. Still, there I was, trimming roses and noting buds on evergreen clematis and rhododendrons and even the flowering dogwood.

This afternoon, I’ll look for a certain pair of bald eagles that have begun nesting in earnest Feb. 14 each winter, not far from where I live. Other eagles will nest later throughout the spring. The rain and clouds will keep coming for few more months. I can take it though. Seeing plants bud and birds nest is as good as a sunny day.

When spring came to Wisconsin

I grew up in Pennsylvania, and spent much of my adult life in Wisconsin. Winters in Wisconsin, though warmer today, were nothing like the moderate Pennsylvania winters I remembered. During one Wisconsin winter in the 70s, the high temperature didn’t get above 0 degrees F for one month. Yep. The HIGH. Then there was the winter, I think 78, when there was so much snow on the ground, the children couldn’t play. People were shoveling snow off their roofs. Roofs that had been built to hold Wisconsin snows. That winter, I took my two-year-old son to the local mall while his sister was in nursery school. We walked through Penney’s and then, at the opening to the mall itself, I said to him, “Run!” He looked up at me in disbelief. Had he heard correctly? “I can run?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “Run!” He took off, giggling all the way, and I smiled, taking big strides to keep up with him. When he got to Sears at the other end, I told him he could turn around and keep running. I don’t remember how many times he ran the length of the mall that day. I just remember one very tired and very happy boy.

We’d moved to Wisconsin in May of 1975, after 5 years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where memories of shocking crimes stood out more than the weather. We made some wonderful friends there. But by graduation, most of us were moving to various parts of the country.

That first winter in Wisconsin, I took Reading the Landscape, taught by the Madison school district’s director of the school forest, Virginia Kline. For two hours every Monday night through most of January, February and March, I listened to Kline talk about Wisconsin’s birds, plants and geology. I was already a casual birder, but Kline’s class opened up the world to me. During the entire time she was telling us about some aspect of Wisconsin’s natural history, she showed slides. A picture of stunning Eastern bluebird got my attention. She explained this beautiful bird arrived in Wisconsin on March 1, like clockwork. How could I suffer from long winters, knowing bluebirds were about? Another harbinger of spring came later in March or early April when ice went out of ponds and lakes. Ducks, swans and loons would drop out of the sky the very day the ice turned to liquid.

While much of March brought snow, I always knew spring began March first, when I could drive in the country and see bluebirds.