…well it had, anyway.  Beginning at the remains of Bonham there were dustings on the road,

which by Sand Pass was enough to make tracks

[passed the Sheriff between there and the RR] and

no tracks at all for some of the way beyond Fish Springs…the frozen mud under the snow

after crossing the California line presaged a Dire Mess come the thaw, but no one was waiting around for that to happen.

We gassed up at Hallelujah Junction where the windshield cleaners were all frozen solid in their containers as it’s illegal to sell anything chiller than 15 degrees in California …messy over Donner, used up quite a lot of my contraband minus twenty degree fluid to facilitate visibility

and made it to birdland, an

other kind of birdland…another kind of climate too though still chill.

Green stuff popping up all ever’whar

and leafing out like crazy but Days of Rain are predicted well into March.

We were fortunate to have a last night out with Bryan, whose trip to Kandahar had recently

been moved up to Tuesday and away he went…leaving us to late winter on the Straits,

added security [feel safer now?] for our obviously suspect watercolor paper [suspected of being overlooked by the arrogant UPS driver since at 10:30 he handed over another package before speeding off to enter “A required security check delayed delivery” as soon as Mr. 9:00 to 9:30 * discovered his error at 10:58]

and after that a trip across the Great Waters

for Meridel’s opening at Brian’s, a look upstairs at Michael Light’s gorgeous dissections of the [yeah, right] ‘left no trace’ remnants of Black Rock City and next door a show at Catharine Clark of  domestic vignettes with plush antique furniture, Afghan war rugs and strangely sleekly creepy anomalies was, despite being hard to see due to the crowds, the most engaging of all.  A swell dinner later in Linda’s old neighborhood at Agricole, very unlike what was around there  then though by the time we came out the nighttime nightclub vibe was much the same, intense.  We made it home easily, back to the back of the Bay

to await the rain.

which did come

and continues to fall upon the greening earth.

*So called because on first meeting he solemnly swore he’d always show up between 9:00 and 9:30…but, yeah sure. Same as it ever was…