Photographing Spring

With everyone going on about the snow, and lamenting that spring hasn't arrived yet, I went through my digital photographs to see if any of this complaining was justified.
Turns out it is, if any complaining about the weather can be justified.
On April 4, 2010, there was no snow in the back field, no snow anywhere, actually. I have a photo of my husband sitting down on the grass by the chicken coop as he constructed the "pedway" that would take the chickens from the coop to their newly-constructed outside pen in the field.
In 2011 and 2012, my crocuses were blooming in early April, the chickens were dirt-bathing around the house, and Stella was lying on the lawn in sunshine chewing a bone.
But April 2014? The same kind of spring as we're having this year. The photo on the left was taken on March 31, 2014. That was the year that it started snowing in mid-December and snowed all the way through March.  That was the year we had several ice storms. So spring was late that year.
But of course, not as late as the following year! Ah, the winter of 2015, when the blizzards of February and March meant there was still ice covering the river when the ospreys returned in early April and snow on our front lawn until well into May.
Yeah, nothing will ever top the winter of 2015 (although I wasn't here for White Juan in 2005 - any comparison?).

Late springs are nothing new for Nova Scotia. We get our share of early springs -- hanging out at the beach in T-shirts on March 22, 2012 -- and late springs when there is still snow in the woods in early April. I see no sense in bitching about the weather. It will be what it will be.
Oh, right: it's inconvenient. Snow needs shovelling. Rain makes everything wet. Clouds are, well, cloudy. Riiiiiight.

This morning on our walk, the field was crowded with robins. We don't get the first robin of the season -- we get the first dozen!
That's what's so great about East Coast weather -- it's never boring and whatever it does, it does it big. And that's the only reason to be obsessed about the weather in Nova Scotia.