For our fresh air and sunshine walk last weekend we went to Mississippi River County Park. This being the messy, melting, still snowy time of year, we prepared ourselves for some slogging and sliding. Instead of slipping down the icy hill to the River, we walked around a nearly-melted open field to get to trails on the topside. The melted snow had congregated into a large pool of water around a sprawling tree—we trekked through the ankle-deep water at the edge of the woods. At first I thought my waterproof boots were no longer waterproof as a wave of cold overtook my feet—luckily I was wrong and still dry-footed. The trails were a combination of snow, ice, mud, water, and dry ground—what a mixed bag, I thought.

The ‘southern’ part of the trail, where sunshine could do its work, was muddy and mostly clear of snow. The warmth of the sun felt like a delicious hug, and my coat choice seemed a bit overcautious as I heated up. We passed a pond of thick ice that had a melted sheen of water glistening on its surface, the old tracks of animals crossing over it still marked in the ice.

Cross-country ski trails were still prominent in the slushy snow where only a week ago, the skiers had inches of fresh snow to glide through. A warm week had made fast work of the melting.

As we looped around to the north side of the park where trees met the River, there was much more snow, and in places, it even crunched under our feet. I was glad for my warmer coat on this stretch of the trail.

The River was also a mixed bag—a thick expanse of snow by the shore was still shaded from the sun by tree shadows. A palette of blues, whites, and grays showcased the melting River ice in all its states.

Back at the picnic shelter, after slowly making our way up the icy hill from the River, we found a message by a chalk artist: “Life can be a little crappie”…

and in small letters and parentheses…”sometimes.” It’s a little fishy play-on-words—if you don’t know better, you read it as ‘crappy’ even though the fish name Crappie is pronounced ‘croppy.’ So the artist gave us something to smile about and something to admire, along with an acknowledgement that sometimes things are messy, difficult, or just a little crappy.

Three feet from the fish artwork was a green picnic table with graffiti carved into it:

‘Mixed bag’ is an idiom from the turn of the twentieth century derived from a hunting term that refers to an assortment of birds killed in a single hunting session and put into a bag they carried for game. A mixed bag is an assortment, a mixture, a miscellaneous collection of things often having both positive and negative qualities or aspects. Our hike last week was a mixed bag of trail conditions. Our lives this past Covid year have been a mixed bag in all sorts of ways. There have been lots of crappy things about the year—and you don’t need me to reiterate them—and there have been lots of surprisingly wonderful things, too. Positive, neutral, and negative, an assortment and a mixture, sometimes life is a little ‘crappie,’ and life is good.