A soft snow puts spring on pause and turns the lane into a poem.

Snow covered branches turn the forest into a modern abstract canvas. Though is it modern art? People thousands of years ago saw these very shapes and forms.

Snow turns the pile of discarded tires some thoughtless person threw away in the dead of night into something beautiful for a day or two. Who do you call to get rid of thirty truck tires tossed onto a vacant lot? Who has thirty truck tires? It’s a mystery with possible connections to desperate and shady characters I’d rather not meet. Maybe someone has whispered something in your ear about these very tires.

Someday in the future, we’ll be able to take a photo with our phones and it will be able to analyze the DNA it sees on such tires instantly and tell us everyone who ever touched the tires. But will we want to know?

Walking home is like walking through a poem.

Every time I make a tofu delivery to the Anacortes Food Co-op, I look forward to the trip home. What will I get to see this time? A few weeks ago I discovered a spot along Padilla Bay where snow geese congregate.

Yesterday panoramas of blue, winter sky, clouds and mountains made me stop a number of times to pause and enjoy the view.

The ducks seem to enjoy this morning’s bright sunshine and blue skies as much as I do. Spring is fast approaching. Something was different this morning. I realized it was light and not yet seven. Just a handful of days before, it was still dark at seven.

As tragic as this pandemic is, one thing I will miss when we get to the other side are the clear pandemic skies. Every sunny day, there is hardly the scar of a contrail in the skies. So this is what the skies looked like for millions of years before we started flinging thousands of jets across them.

It is that time of year when fields become vast lakes. The lakes appear to be permanent landmarks. But when the winter rains end, the lakes will become fields again. In the meantime the temporary lakes are beautiful to look at.

At today’s end these beautiful clouds took over the full sky for just a short time. Wow! Tragedy may be all around us, but earth can’t turn off its beauty.

On cool, misty days, low clouds can barely rise above the valley floor. Are they just too lazy or tired to float up above the mountains? Or do they enjoy the feel of the tree tops tickling their bellies?

This time of year there is never a dry moment in the woods, something the mushrooms relish. Everywhere toadstools and mushrooms push their caps above the soft forest floor.

There are so many mushrooms feeding on this log, if I close my eyes and listen, I could probably hear them eating and commenting to each other on how the log tastes.

But every so often, the sun breaks through to remind us that the sky is still blue above the clouds. Spring is coming. Actually this year, it feels like spring is rushing in.

Winter rains have not washed away the mountains. The forested mountains are still there. On some rainy winter days you wonder if anything will be left when the rains finally lift.

Those are flocks of swans in the pasture, not sheep. Swan Valley would be a fitting, alternative name for Skagit Valley.

Yesterday was notable. It ended as it started, with brilliant pink skies.