Reflections on the Eleventh Week of Winter – Hunting Coltsfoot

    Monday, when I walked down Chestnut Street in Meadville with a swim bag over my left shoulder and a packed-for-all-emergencies purse on my right, a flash of yellow stopped me. Crocuses bloomed in front of the Unitarian Church. Pausing to soak in the tiny flowers’ beauty, I wondered why I hadn’t seen any coltsfoot along the roadsides. Also yellow, coltsfoot often bloom before crocuses.

    Though coltsfoot resemble dandelions from a distance, they are daisy-shape up close. They dot country berms with yellow and signal the waning of winter. I’d never searched for coltsfoot. Like dandelions, coltsfoot just appear in abundance. Puzzled that I hadn’t seen any yet this year, I lugged my bags to the YMCA and vowed to hunt for coltsfoot on the way home.

    None flashed by on the highway so I slowed the car to a safe, berm-scoping crawl on West Creek Road. No yellow flowers.

    Had the wet winter disturbed their rhizomes?

    With only six sunny days in February, was the weather too cloudy for the flowers to open?

    Tuesday afternoon, during a moment of sunshine, I searched by foot. Between the log house and garage, I inspected leaf litter and gravel on the bank above the drainage ditch. The debris camouflaged eight coltsfoot flowers–smaller than the normal one inch diameter but still vibrant yellow. Coltsfoot had survived the wet and clouds.

    Then snow fell Wednesday night.

    When I lugged my school bag, swim bag, lunch bag, and purse to the car for a day in Meadville Thursday, snow covered every coltsfoot. I didn’t worry. Late winter flowers can handle a little snow.

    I celebrated Dr. Seuss’ birthday with children at the Learning Center. While the younger ones wrote sentences about cats in hats and the older ones guessed which books rhyming passages came from, snow melted and left the crocuses by the church flattened as if they’d been knocked down by a flood.

    Uh oh.

    Back at Wells Wood, I paced between the house and garage staring at gravel and dead leaves. No yellow flowers. On the fourth pass, a speck of yellow the size of a pencil’s diameter caught my eye. Green sepals encased all but the tip of a coltsfoot. Five inches to the left another closed flower sported an even smaller tip of yellow. Only two of the original eight survived the snow.

    Stretching my leg across the two foot wide drainage ditch, I settled my boot in an inch of trickling water and gravel. Bags banged against my sides and back while I bent over and rummaged through the leaves for broken branches. Glad no one was around to wonder why I was in such a ludicrous posture, I arranged the branches in a triangle around the two closed coltsfoot. The triangle would save me time locating the plants again.

    Or not.

    Friday morning snow covered the triangle and the coltsfoot. Saturday, temperatures in the mid twenties (-4º C) and cloudy skies kept the coltsfoot closed. And today, after the temperatures dipped to 10º F (-12º C) overnight causing the logs in the house to contract at different rates and pop, crack, bang me awake, I didn’t even check for flowers.

    But next week, with bags hanging off my shoulders, I’ll walk to the garage and hunt for coltsfoot, a sign of a waning winter.