Recently in Philadelphia Category

WE KNOW IT CAN ONLY GET WORSE, and yet we can't help but notice how nice these last couple of days have been.  A long sunny weekend in early March, an almost warm Monday.  The sense of spring, not in abstract or memory, but to feel it in the air like sex in the wind.  I can smell Spring around here!

  But it's a tease, not even a lie. March is a month only a mother could love. Such a disappointment. Not allowed to be still winter, not supposed to be spring.  Acting out all the time.

  I see no lamb in March.  A lion certainly, but not roaring necessarily.  I see an inscrutable lionlike presence in the month of March.  Like that snow sphinx above. March is patient.  March has seen it all. 

WHEN SNOW GETS UGLY, which is right about now for those keeping score at home, it tends to mountain up in dirty piles ten feet tall.  When snow gets ugly, it's lost its charm and even its  menace.  It's just there.  It no longer everywhere.  It's no longer unavoidable. It's like a week's worth of trash that hasn't been picked up for two weeks.

  This pile on Montgomery Avenue in Narberth is more than a week old, and even then it was decorated by a hopeful message in red "(Spring is Coming!") plus the black logo of the Main Line Bicycle store (those are supposed to be bicycle chain links, although to me it looks more like the word "grog") where the pile takes up one of its parking spaces.

 I haven't seen this much snow hang around Philadelphia this long since the Winter of '77.   That's the winter of Nineteen Seventy-Seven -- Dag Nabbit!!  -- the coldest winter anyone in  these parts can remember..  With another snow storm on its way Thursday and Friday, our already record-breaking winter snowfall may actually become the equivalen of the epic "Snows of Yesteryear" we used to hear about from our grandparents.