Saturday, April 03, 2010, 03:46
April Showers (Or Lack Thereof)
I'm sorry, but this is just plain *weird* to be this warm so early in April. The high temperature on Thursday was almost 80 degrees. It was in the 70s the last few days of March. And the snow has been completely gone for a couple of weeks already. It seems more like early May rather than the end of March and early April.
The weather has been incredibly windy this week, too. Tuesday the wind was out of the south at around 25 to 30 mph, and the air was really full of grit.
Randy had to have a wheel bearing replaced on his truck. Since the anti-lock brake sensor is in the wheel bearing, the total was a little expensive -- nearly $350.
After spending that much on a wheel bearing, you want to make sure it works.
I took my husband into town Tuesday evening to pick up the truck. Then we went on a somewhat winding and twisting drive through the township north and west of where we live. It is rather remote with woods and marsh and some old fields up that way.
The thing I found quite disturbing was that the marshes, for the most part, were all dry. This early in the spring, after the snow has melted, the marshes should be full of water. But there are acres and acres and acres of marshland that is completely dry.
Only in one spot, where there was a small pool of water, could you hear any spring peeper frogs. And even that marsh, with its small pool of water, only had about a quarter of the water that it does when it is at full capacity.
The marsh a half mile down the road, which is usually noisy with spring peepers at this time of year, is completely silent. In other years, maybe almost 10 years ago now, when we walked down that way in the evening, the spring peepers would be so many and so vocal, you could hardly hear yourself talk. And now the marsh is dead silent.
Friday afternoon when I went to get the mail for the newspaper office, I stopped to talk to some people who were out cleaning up a yard. The one woman said she was from farther up north in Wisconsin and that while it is dry around here, it is much worse where she is from.
It seems incredible to me that the east coast can get seven inches of rain -- but we can't hardly get any rain at all. Friday afternoon when I was driving home, I could seen lightning on the western horizon. And yes, after a while, we did get some rain showers. But not a tremendous amount of rain. Maybe one or two tenths of an inch.
On the way into town in the morning, I wondered if we were headed back to the Dust Bowl days again. The south wind was kicking up dirt in an open field, and I drove through a cloud of dirt in the air. We've seen that quite a lot around here in the past few years, clouds of dirt in the spring from what is really marginal farmland that might be best planted to trees.
With any luck at all, the few showers we got Friday afternoon will keep the soil where it belongs. For a day or two, anyway.
And, oh, yes -- Randy's brakes work just fine now. Thank goodness.
LeAnn R. Ralph
Monday, March 29, 2010, 05:44
(No) March Snow
This does not bode well at all for the mitigating of our drought conditions over the past six years. For several weeks now, the weather forecast has been predicting precipitation every couple of days, but we have not seen hardly a drop of rain or a flake of snow.
In fact, so far, we have not had any snow in March. And March is usually the month when we get the most snow. Not so much in the past few years with the drought, but usually we have gotten some snow in March.
This year, what snow we had was all melted by the middle of March. It is nice to have the snow gone and mud gone. But when it is so dry, it leaves me feeling uneasy. Especially when the weather forecast was predicting rain for Saturday night, and all we got out of it was about six raindrops. My mother, who lived through the Great Depression, used to call sparse rain like that, when more rain was predicted, "dry weather drops."
I also see in the county newspaper that the fire danger is now high in our county. That also does not bode particularly well. There ought to be enough moisture in the soil yet, right after the snow has melted, so that grass fires cannot get a toehold. But apparently that's not the case. We usually do have danger of grass fires a little later in the spring when the ground has dried out but the grass has not yet turned green. But this is really early for that kind of fire danger.
A gentleman came into the newspaper office this past week to renew his subscription. He informed me that the severe drought in 1988 started out this way with a warm and dry March. We have had a drought for six years. But I suppose it could be even more dry than it has been and maybe will be more dry.
It worked out quite well last year to collect rain off the barn roof to water the garden. Even when we only got a tenth of an inch of rain, my buckets would have quite a lot of water in them for the garden.
But not enough rain can be collected off the barn roof for the hayfield. And I would like to, for once, be able to get hay off our own field without having to buy hay for Kajun and Isabelle.
Of course, weather conditions can change quickly. But I am not going to hold my breath. We have been in a drought pattern for too long to think that the weather conditions will change quickly.
Then again, I could be wrong. I hope so.
LeAnn R. Ralph