Melrose Snowmelt, again

 In the winter that I was four or five years old when we lived on Melrose, the backyard filled up with snow that accumulated over many snowfalls without melting, the way it does in the Midwest. To play in the backyard mean wearing warm clothes and boots. Our feet would sink deep in the snow when we tried to walk on it. It was fun to play in the snow but it such a relief to be back inside and strip off the winter clothes we put on, just to go out and play a few feet from the house.

When you are a little kid, the winters are long, like an ice age. When spring finally came and the world warmed up, the accumulated snow in the backyard began to melt. It had barely melted much because it did not receive afternoon sun. As it finally did so, the water drained began to drain along our house down the slope of the front yard on the newly revealed grass there, forming what seemed to me to be a massive river.

I was delighted and fascinated by it. It was my own little geography that I could discover explore. To me, the water flowing was a mighty river like the ones I heard about and saw in the atlas in my grandparents house. 

I believed it was something that happened always, every winter, but I never saw anything quite like that since then. It was the beginning of a lifelong fascinating with snowmelt and the streams that descend in the spring from the accumulation of a winter.