Today we say farewell to January — and the snowpack. Even though we’ve had daytime temperatures in the 50s, the nights have been cold enough and the snow deep enough that at my house we’ve had some form of white stuff on the ground since January 5th.

But now the rain has moved in and the yard is a mottled mess, saturated soil with snow stripes like cirrus clouds. Somehow, though, the section where the snow was deepest still shows faint sled tracks from when the kiddos were here.

We mark the landscape in ways we cannot fathom, not just in the practices that give us firestorms and mudslides and summer nights without fireflies. But also with subtle signatures: the breaking of a twig and the harrowing of a track. This truth is more obvious when snow is on the ground. In that sense, snow keeps us honest. I’ll be sad to see it go.