"Spring thaw!" Or: "So that's where the Christmas tree went."

So, say it’s the mid seventies and I’m eight or nine years old. Where is the one place I’m likely to be? Sitting at a desk doing my homework? Helping little old ladies across the street? Cleaning up a park with the Cub Scouts? Fat chance. No, I would have been safely ensconced at the foot of my parent’s bed watching TV, that’s where. It was, after all, TV that showed me the most amazing things in the world. Wile E. Coyote, for instance, taught me rather a lot about physics, M*A*S*H taught me the difference between being a smartass and a smart smartass, and the Marx Brothers taught me just about everything else I needed to know.**

Still, though, my favorite shows were documentaries about science in general and archeology in particular. There was nothing better in the world than an episode about mummies, lost cities in the Amazon, or best of all: long lost flights that reappear only after having been ejected from the glaciers that had been their final resting place.

So you can imagine my excitement when I surveyed the back yard this morning and found it completely free of ice and snow for the first time since December. Whooo! The Spring thaw is here, and this afternoon was the first chance of the season to press the boys into service. We were out and about and found all kinds detritus that had been locked away in the rare deep freeze that this winter had brought: turns out our Christmas tree was just a few feet from the driveway, there were shovels and rakes past the deck that I have no recollection of owning, and there were a couple of bats and waffle balls still out near the swing since a nice spell of weather in early December had lulled us into a false sense of security.

Unsurprisingly the boys didn’t find the whole enterprise nearly as entertaining as I did, and in fairness to them our little expedition wasn’t nearly as cool as the one that found Mallory, but hey, spring is here and I got them outside and moving around on a nice afternoon.

**Which, upon reflection, probably explains my skill at charming middle-aged dowagers.

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(Mallory turns up here too, just in case you're not the link clicking sort.)