What is a mystery melt? Yesterday morning we had snow showers, and cold temperatures all afternoon.  When I went out to the henhouse I noticed this mystery melt  that ran from the top of the slope towards our wellhead.

I  thought it was so strange to have such a clearly demarked area when the cold temperatures kept the veil of snow intact everywhere else.

We have a lot of water on  our hill with intermittent streams that have created paths of water/damp loving sedges in our  fields. There is a dug well up in the field, a 30 foot dug well lined with stone (an artful marvel of engineering) in back of the house near our drilled well, and a shallow dug well in the North Lawn Bed. The Sunken Garden is nearly a swimming pool from spring into mid-summer. Water comes coursing into our basement – and out through a conduit and onto the road. Water everywhere.

Thinking about all the water on our  hill showed I was on the right track. When I showed this to my husband Henry at the end of the day, he didn’t think it was a river or stream, but a spring not far below the surface. The area has always been wet. Then when we had work done on our foundation a few years ago our construction guy was moving soil around behind the house. Henry pointed out that the shape of this melt looked a lot like a bulldozer scrape. The spring was then just a little closer to the surface.

It’s possible. What do you think.