It has been a cold winter here in Chi-town, but things have been warming up quite a bit the past few days. The snow that has been on the ground since the end of December is finally starting to melt. The giant, and quite impressive snow fort down the block has melted to a foot high ring. As a child who grew up in Texas, where on the few occasions it snowed you were happy to be able to gather all of the snow up in the yard into one basketball sized half grass half snow-ball, I was particularly amazed by this 5 foot high fort with foot inch thick walls all the way around. I am sad to see it go, although the relief I feel at finally having a break from the bitter cold, is tempered by the fact that the snow that is remaining is over a month old, and thus disgustingly dirty. It has also revealed a ton of trash that has been hidden behind snow banks for the past month, and is now littering the streets. Our back yard in particular is no exception.
For the past month we had been able to delude ourselves into thinking that it was not that bad. We had forgotten about all of the construction debri that was hidden underneath. The yard is now slowly being revealed as things slowly warm up, and all of the garbage is starting to come to light again. What a mess.
