The End of Winter, Snow Mountains, Shopping Carts, Baba Marta, and March Madness

Winter Haiku #2

winter snow on the
freezing ground lingers
where the hell is spring?
KDB 2014

There is something about the end of winter that's extremely messy.

The large mountains of snow in the parking lots are finally starting to melt, and it's fascinating to see what surprises they yield.  They are also quite disgusting from the road dirt.  I think our air is polluted, too because snow never stays white for more than a day or so.  We are breathing in that nasty stuff.  The dirt in snowbanks and the dust on your furniture is air pollution.  When it comes to pollution, the United States is becoming more like China every day..

An anthropologist two hundred years from now would have a field day analyzing the junk buried in a snow mountain from a parking lot. But the garbage will have been cleaned up long before then. What kind of stuff shows up after the snow melts?

Crusts of pizza, frozen and long abandoned, become sustenance for hungry seagulls. There are soda cans, pizza boxes, and plastic bags: all the flotsam and jetsam of modern society.  Long buried shopping carts, frozen into the ice mountain, magically appear come March.

I'm surprised the Mafia or the gangbangers haven't thought of this method of disposing dead bodies. Think of all the mammoths from the Ice Age that were frozen for posterity and found many centuries later.

There is a book titled The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America, A Guide to Field Identification. The author classified them by category by location and condition, much like a naturalist would categorize flora and fauna. He must be a Virgo with a lot of time on his hands. Read the book reviews, they're quite funny.

Here is the cart I used on a recent shopping trip.  Notice the dirty snowbank in the background.  Some of this snow dates from the first snowstorm in January, and not much has melted since then.  It has been a horrible winter.

Shopping carts have sociological significance. People who can't afford cars use them to bring home groceries. Homeless people use them to transport their worldly goods.  Nothing gets as much abuse as a shopping cart.  Everyone except the store owners (who spend a lot of money on them) see them as expendable. They often get pushed off ravines and into rivers.

The Aldi Supermarket, where I shop for gourmet ethnic food at discount prices, has the right idea.  They have coin-operated shopping carts, and most of them get returned to the store.

Supposedly there is another snowstorm on the way soon.  It's March for goodness sakes, usually by now the crocuses have started to pop up in my front yard.

The Bulgarians have a holiday on March 1, honoring a lady named Baba Marta (Grandma March).  You have to wear a red and white charm, called a Martenitsa for good luck, to ward off winter and bring on spring.  Maybe it's time to get this custom started in the United States, especially since they already have spring weather in Bulgaria.

I am sick of winter!

If you want to learn more about this charming custom, read my companion blog, The Alien Diaries. Maybe it's time to get everyone to wear a Martenitsa. We can make it an arts and crafts project in our schools. It might even take the edge of March Madness, when all the sports crazies are glued to the couch watching basketball.

Here's to an early spring!

Announcement!

Three of my poems (pages 62-64)  have been published recently in The Art of Being Human, Volume 9,  an anthology of international poetry. What a wonderful collection of great poetry from around the world! Thank you, Daniela Voicu and Brian Wrixon, for making this possible.  .

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