45 Minutes North

Have we gone a week, in our nearly three months here, without rain? I really don't think we have. 

The Mendon Hills will disappear in white or the skies over the parks and the grocery store parking lots will pull together gray and down the rains will come. 

I really love it. (If I were limited to just one pattern of weather for the rest of eternity I think it would be this). 

But is it typical for this time of year in Cache Valley? I assume it's just been a rainy year. But I don't actually know. 

We've only moved 45 minutes north. It never occurred to me I would get to relearn the seasons. 

But we wake to mist and fog nearly every day now. (On my run this morning I actually almost burst out with a little sob they looked so beautiful floating over some freshly cleared fields.) We almost never experienced fog before moving just "45 minutes north", so how do I know, yet, what is typical for this little valley?

I don't! And it's kind of exciting to think that it's not only people, and schools, and places I will get to know up here, but all these other patterns as well.

How early in the spring will the frogs start chirping? Will they always last till August like they did this year? Are there always this many grasshoppers? Will the Sandhill Cranes stay through the winter? (I still hear and see them now, but the flocks of black ibises that I love appear to be gone.) How many months of the year will be filled with mosquitos? (They still haven't fully left us yet!) How much colder will the winters be? And how much later in the year will the snows last? (I used to watch the temperatures up here, back when we were in Pleasant View, and I swear it seemed that, while the summers were only two or three degrees cooler, the winter temperatures were typically a full ten degrees colder.) Will I see the milkweed, dried and split open like cotton, lining all the county roads every October? (Incidentally I read this yesterday--when I wondered over milkweed looking so much like cotton: "while the fibers of both plants are white and fluffy, milkweed just doesn't have what it takes to be made into pants." :)) Will our neighbors have a new herd of horses every spring for me to watch out our back windows? (They just sold the horses that have been back there all summer.)

I keep saying little anxious prayers that I won't grow so accustomed to all these new things--birds, and frogs, and mists, and stretches of field dotted with cows--that I stop feeling all this awe and gratitude. (And I feel a little badly about all the things I wasn't noticing back in Pleasant View!) It occurs to me that that is something nobody can take away from you--whatever happiness and joy you feel in your home, or the weather, or views around you. And I don't want to accidentally give those joys up! 

(Also, Starling has quit calling this place the rental. She used to always cry (out in the stroller on runs or in the cart at the store with me), "Let's go back to the rental now." Or "Is it time to go back to the rental yet?" But lately I've noticed she mostly says things like, "I see our roof! We're almost home!" and "Can we go home now?" I think that's a good sign.)