St Paddy’s Day has come & gone, and still not much is wearing green in Upstate.

But this clump of moss was like a vibrant little island in the woods.

I took a picture of it with my cellphone, to look at daily, because it’s the greenest thing I’ve seen for months.

You may spot a few white pellets — the snow was pelting down in angular, misshapen granules.

I was once in a kind of sketchy pub, and the bartender told us, “No ice, it’s gone off.”

We stuck with bottled beer that night, and didn’t use the glasses.

I’d never heard of ice going bad before.  But then, moving into a new apartment, we found the ice cubes in the freezer were shrunken in their little tray compartments, no longer cubes in fact, and seemed to have picked up a metallic odor.  I guess there was that incident with the Titanic, too, now I think about it, under the heading “Bad Ice.”

Even the weather is tired of ice and snow by now.  The precipitation has become unimaginative.  Old Man Winter is  spring cleaning, too tired to dream up new crystalline shapes, just shoveling out whatever icy trash is left in the clouds,  sleet and grayish-white grit, can’t be bothered with delicate snowflakes.

And so in the cold dun and gray, a homely clump of moss receives its due, and becomes our hero for the day, a real luminary in the woods.