signs of spring or signs of winter...

I love spring.  The trees are budding.  The flowers are blooming.  The wheat is growing.  Everything is slowly but surely turning green, giving a bit of color to the earth again.  I love it.  However, this last weekend, there was nothing spring about spring.  In fact, it looked like we were in mid-winter.   We had a blizzard.  That's right.  A blizzard at the end of March.  It began raining on Thursday night, sleeting (a lot) on Friday morning and into the late afternoon when it began to snow.  This wasn't normal snow.  It was unlike any that I had ever seen.  It wasn't just snowflakes.  It was clumps of snow...small little snowballs falling from the sky.  Perhaps if I lived in Alaska, Colorado, or up north somewhere, I wouldn't be so surprised by this.  However, I am in Oklahoma.  The news channels encouraged people to stay at home and not venture out.  Did we listen?  Certainly not!  We actually had a commitment to be at the college, and the event was not going to be cancelled or postponed under any circumstances.  It was the Regional Speech Tournament.  The teams were already at the hotel, so the only problem was getting them to the college.  That's where my husband came in to play.  He, his dad, and his grandpa went around to the hotels and various houses throughout the community to pick up people and take them to the college in their four-wheel drive vehicles.  Our highway to get into town was actually closed, and all of the streets in town were completely full of snow.  By the end of the tournament on Saturday, it finally stopped snowing with a total accumulation of 24 inches of snow on the ground.  And just as quickly as it all came down, it began melting almost immediately.  The boys had a great time playing in it while it lasted. They played in it Saturday and Sunday and then after school on Monday.  There's still traces of snow on the ground where there were four foot drifts, but it will probably all be gone by the time they're out of school today.  If this had actually happened in December, I'm sure we'd have snow for quite some time.  I'm hoping that after that snow, winter is actually over and we're headed into spring...for real this time.