Winter is breaking. Four days of sun melted the icy base along the river, bringing shrouds of fog in the morning which slowly evaporate in the sun's low arc to expose battered corpses of trees. Animal carcasses in the melting snowbanks, but putrefaction isn't in the air. Just the far-away scent of hope and a vague fragrance of life waiting to escape four months' coma.

The clouds are rolling back in, and they are dark. The wind is out of the northwest and it's as cold as a shadow on the moon. We don't call them groundhogs here, but those fat rodents don't lie.