A federal law in the U.S. specifies that daylight time applies from 2 a.m. on the second Sunday of March until 2 a.m. on the first Sunday of November in areas that do not specifically exempt themselves.

I wonder every year what happens to the hour we lose when we spring forward. Where does it go? I also wonder every year why we bother with daylight saving time. Something to do with cows, I think.

Outside my apartment, a giant snowbank is dwindling, despite sporadic snow squalls, and it is getting easier to see oncoming traffic as I back out onto the state road.

Those who live in southern climes may have a romantic idea of snow, the way Adirondackers do right before Christmas, picturing it in our mind’s eye as it appears in postcards and calendar photographs and Ski resort advertisements.

Still, there is some truth to the old saws absence makes the heart grow fonder and familiarity breeds contempt. Old snowbanks, begrimed with car exhaust and dirt, and patchy gray remnants of snow on dead-looking lawns do not do much to beautify the landscape. Without leaves or snow, the scene is laid bare to reveal a winter’s worth of accumulated litter and detritus.

It is snowing furiously in Keene Valley as I write, goose feather snow. It looks as if nature is still asleep. Not so, however.

According to “Adirondack Rhythms: A Nature Calendar of Images & Observations from the Adirondack Wild Lands,” by Allison W. Bell, in March Ravens and barred owls are laying eggs, and great horned owlets are beginning to hatch.

Bobcats, otters and chipmunks are breeding, fisher and red fox kits are being born, black bears are emerging, wood frogs and spring peepers will soon begin to come out and sing, male red winged blackbirds are winging their way back, and, as my cat Jupiter has observed, rodent tunnels have become visible.

Those who were born in the North Country and have spent their entire lives here may be surprised to learn that Mud Season is not a universal concept. Not every place has a mud season. It must be quite a shock to a student who travels outside the Blue Line to attend college when he mentions mud season to a new roommate, only to be met with a bemused smile. What? Also, no one has ever heard of a bob run. What’s sugaring, by the way? I don’t think “sugar” is an intransitive verb, an English major says. This could mark the beginning of an Adirondack freshman’s identity crisis.

Regional though it may be, Mud Season is real, and it is serious. March and April weather is changeable, a constant tease. Sunny skies cloud over; rain turns to sleet, sleet turns to snow, and then it’s raining again. After an especially snowy winter, the mud is deep.

About 30 years ago, when I was new in town, I went to a Keene Central School event and left my car off to the far right side of the parking lot, where there was, for some reason, plenty of room. When I came out of the school I learned why local parents had avoided that area. The parking lot was not yet paved in those days, and my car was sunk over its hubcaps in a field of mud. It was like quicksand. The more I spun my wheels the deeper I was mired.

Luckily, Thomas McCabe, the husband of Joy McCabe, the English teacher, had a rope and a truck, and he heroically pulled the car out of the mud. I don’t remember whether he had a winch.

The Ukraine has a mud season too, and Russian tanks are getting stuck. Can you imagine trying to pull a sinking Russian tank out of the mud? It is not easy, even with a winch.

“Tanks and mud are not friends,” said a U.S. Marine–a former tank maintainer– quoted anonymously in the military news publication “Task and Purpose,” March 2, 2022. “That’s something I expected for that part of the world. Eastern Europe is either frozen or it’s f-ing muddy, that’s just how it is.”

In recent news, collective farmers from Bashtanka, Ukraine, burned a Russian anti-aircraft Pantsir-C system, worth $15 million, which had become immobilized in the mud. According to the town’s mayor, the Russian soldiers ran away through the fields “like rats.”

Have a good week.