LOCAL VIEW –Flower Snow–

I’ve waited a long time to play the part, so I sort of like being a grumpy, yet wise, old farmer. Not that I didn’t try it when younger.

One of my favorite stories involves a time I was a younger gardener in 1990, and advised a spring-feverish older and wiser lady (from Virginia) that it might be unwise, even though early-April temperatures set records and hit ninety, to plant tomatoes in April in New Hampshire. A week later she called me in, to serve me hot tea on a heated porch full of hothouse blooms, from where I worked out drenched in her rose garden in a cold rain mixed with wet snow. The kindly old woman bleakly looked out the window as she handed me my wonderful tea, and said three wonderful words: “You were right.”

But that small victory lacked the quality of grumpiness necessary to play the part of an elder. After all, she was my elder. I had to keep my eyebrows up and smile, and not call her a durned fool, and only “suggest” it was unwise to plant tomatoes. It lacked the full joy of unleashed grumpiness.

Old age may limit me in other respects, but it allows me great freedom in terms of grumpiness. It is sort of fun to scare younger people who are in fact bigger and stronger, or even smaller and stronger, but the smallest see right through my grouchiness to the twinkle in my eyes. When I grump they often laugh. At my Childcare I often grumble something like, “Do I look like some sort of couch? My mother didn’t raise me to be a couch!” This doesn’t phase the kids a bit, as they crowd around to view pictures in a book during story-time, pressing in from all sides and even perching on my shoulders like a pirate’s parrots.

I really think it is wrong to expect children to pass any sort of pre-kindergarten “tests”, or to try to grade them and place them on “levels of development”. They are what they are. Many great men were amazingly “slow” in certain respects. Thomas Edison couldn’t talk until he was four. One American president was still illiterate at age twelve. And Winston Churchill never did learn to be respectful. With children aged three I think it is best to simply expose them to lots, and allow them to absorb what absorbs.

My “curriculum”, if it can be called that, is merely whatever strikes me as noteworthy in our landscape, or whatever work I am doing to operate our toy farm. In early April one “subject” of my “curriculum” is the first flowers, which appear on the hardiest trees. Some are just dull colors from a distance, but intricate beauty, up close.

For example, the short, shrub-like willow called “glaucous willow”, (a real pain if it grows near your drains or leech field due to its webbing, clogging roots, but perhaps useful as a substitute for aspirin), has a moment of glory in the early spring when it forms catkins that look like small, gray, furry tail-tips, or perhaps rabbit’s feet, called “pussy willows”. As a small boy in the 1950’s I recall teachers bringing these fur-tipped twigs into classroom as proof winter wouldn’t last forever, in early March (in Massachusetts). However the true beauty and glory often goes unnoticed, and occurs when the male catkins produce their pollen. The beauty is something to sneeze at:

I like to show such things to small children, simply to see if they are the slightest bit fascinated. Some find dinosaurs far more interesting, even though dinosaurs are extinct and pussy willows are not.

OK. Maybe boys aren’t interested in pussy willows. How about the intricate, tiny blooms of swamp maples?

I guess not, in the case of this small boy.

OK then, how about a small girl?

If we were allowed to be scientific any more, we might hypothesize that the above suggests that small girls are different from small boys. However that would be sexist, so I will not suggest such a hypothesis. I certainly will never suggest small girls are superior. Nor will I suggest they are more English than French, for it is the English gentlemen who fussed about flower-gardens and poetry, as the French fussed about wine, women and gluttony (back in Victorian times.) God forbid!

Back in Victorian times the French and English were allowed to differ, without it being seen as proof they were fascists, and hated the bland conformity of Globalism. The English allowed their children to run around naked on beaches even in the 1940’s, which the French found barbaric, as their children wore suits. The French also considered African woman barbaric, and asked African women not to go topless in sweltering African heat, and instead to wear blouses. The Africans complied, but then noticed the French women promptly started going topless on the French Riviera. It is little wonder to me Africans decided enough was enough, and all the French colonies insisted they be allowed to differ, which involved declaring independence at the same time (1960).

Globalists seem to feel all people in all places should march the same way in lockstep, but to me history seems to show nations and states and neighborhoods and families and even individuals are unique and each have a fingerprint unlike any other. God made people different for reasons all His own, and I prefer to avoid challenging God. I’ll make a lousy Globalist. I certainly don’t attempt to make the children at my Childcare walk in lockstep.

In any case, I’ve lived long enough to know the white things that fall in the spring in April in New Hampshire are unlikely to be cherry blossom petals. If I was ridiculous, and demanded all the small children pay attention, and focus on blossoms, blossoms, and nothing but blossoms, they would not have to rebel and declare their independence from blossoms, for the weather would be anti-blossom for them.

At this point the the Globalists will raise a predictable hue and cry about unpredictable weather an old grouch like me predicted. I still have a boyhood diary, (I think from 1964), describing an April snowstorm south of here, just west of Boston. Yet the Fake News states recent snow is proof Global Warming is upon us, (though snow is not warming). If I suggest otherwise, I get banned from Twitter and Facebook and YouTube. Is it any wonder I am grumpy? These young High-tech whippersnappers are suppose to respect their elders, not censor them. But younger kids are kinder. They remembered I grouched we shouldn’t plant tomatoes and should only plant peas. One five-year-old looked at me after the late snow and wondered, “How’d you know it would snow again?” I grouched, “I didn’t know it. Some years it doesn’t. But most years it does.” But it did seem nice that, even if Globalists don’t respect me, a certain five-year-old does.

But the snow was murder to remove from the entrance of the Childcare. Mid April sunshine is as powerful as late August sunshine, when people sunbathe on beaches, and snow turns into slush which is too heavy for snow blowers to handle. I faced resorting to a primitive thing called “a shovel”, because some young mothers have removed their snow tires from their cars and boots from their feet, and arrive in optimistic ankle-high sneakers.

I only shoveled the lead-like snow from a few strategic places, but that was enough to cripple me. I figured it was an opportunity to die with my boots on, but I was unfortunate and didn’t drop dead, and instead lived on to creak groaning from my bed the next day. I was so grumpy I needed an aspirin, coffee, and the cure called “composing”.

I stir first coffee, hoping it will stir
My sense of humor, as I look outside
At a tangerine sunrise and say, “Brr.”
A half-foot of ermine is draped to hide
The slender shoulders of spring. The snow lies
Like white lies. It will fade like last night’s dreams.
The spring birds know it, and fill the dawn’s skies
With an unsnowy chorus. To me it seems
They sing to a One Spring that is lasting.
All else is passing. Nothing gold can stay.
Dawn sinks down to day. Prayer and fasting
Understands we gain by taking away.
These brief April snows are like all our woes:
Shadows that pass as a Lasting Light grows. 

My boyhood diary from 1964 marvels how swiftly the eight inches of snow vanished, with very brief entries: “Sunny, only four inches left;” “Sunny, only two inches left;” and “Warm; snow all gone but a few places.” I hope this legalizes my telling the kids at the Childcare, “It will all be gone in a twinkling”, although I’m sure certain Globalists would disapprove. Officially, in 1964 snow melted swiftly because it was April and the sun was as high as it is in August, but now it melts swiftly due to Carbon Footprints.

Still, as it all melted I found reason to be grumpy. I pity the poor devastated daffodils. They are native to the north shore of the Mediterranean, where they are born to spring up and wave in warm breezes, perpetually perky (until they become perky seedpods).

It is cruel to transplant such southern bulbs to New Hampshire, where they spring up and and are allowed to be perky for a day or two or three or four, before being buried by heavy, wet snow. Year after year the snow melts to reveal devastated Daffodils discouraged and drooping. And this year was no different.

At this point I likely should write a sonnet about how outsiders need to adapt and evolve when they are aliens to the environment they are transplanted into. Englishmen need to adapt to France and Frenchmen to England. Globalists need to adapt to everybody, rather than asking everyone to adapt to them. But I’ve been there and done that. Check out my sonnet on daffodils, from a couple of years back. (I leave it up to you to conduct the search; it would be vain of me to link to my own sonnet.)

Now I am older and wiser, and basically what I have learned is ancient and not new. It is why we should respect our elders, and why it was wrong for my generation to adopt the motto, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” (I think Timothy Leary yammered that idiotic motto when he was forty-four.)

As the the snow melted I saw something besides the depressingly drooping daffodils. It was hopeful. Can you see it in these pictures? (Hint: As the snow first fell the turf was burned brown by last fall’s drought, January’s snowless flash-freeze’s wind-burn, and this spring’s drought.)

We waited long for the iron sod to thaw,
And so it seems a cruel joke that cold snow
Buries the softened pasture, yet the crow’s caw
Sounds happy; not the croak of weighted woe
You’d expect. A drenched dove softly coos
Love’s questions. A wet robin rejoices.
Not a single bird is singing the blues.
From whence comes the joy in all these voices?
Even the gruff old farmer smiles, with eyes
Full of mischief. He growls, “Why the long face?
Don’t you know this snow wears blessing’s disguise?
Beneath white, brown grass greens. It is a case
Where snow gets called, “Poor Man’s Fertilizer.”
Spring’s here, even if fools can’t recognize her.

LOCAL VIEW –Fall Peepers–

There is always a danger of missing the beauty right before your nose, especially if you take it for granted. I’m sure people who live with spectacular views can get up in the morning and look out the window and say, “The Matterhorn…Ho hum.” In such cases it helps a little to have people come from all over the world to see what you take for granted.

But then there is a new danger of acting as a sort of prop to the scenery. Years ago I lived with a Navajo in Arizona, and I used to kid him about a stoic expression he always assumed when tourists snapped pictures, and with a bit of a smile he’d inform me, “That is how Indians are suppose to look. Check out Arizona Highways magazine.”

I remembered him years later when I was raking leaves off the beaten path for a rich lady, using an old fashioned rake rather than a leaf-blower, and much to my surprise saw a bus come swaying and lurching down the lane, barely squeezing between the old stone walls. The upper part of the bus was largely glass, and on the inside I could see all the tourists, who I assumed were from Japan, were all pressed up against the glass snapping pictures of me, the quaint Yankee raking leaves. As hard as I tried to be natural, I found myself assuming a pose, and felt like a picture in National Geographic.

A third way to miss the beauty is to rate it. No two autumns are the same, and some have briefer beauty, because a gale rips all the leaves off the trees, while others have a browner beauty, because of drought. Rather than appreciating the variety I sometimes look back to the year which was the most brilliant, and become comparative.

The second half of the summer was so wet that all were expecting an especially brilliant autumn. But brilliance is dependent on sunshine. As I took the kids from the Childcare out on a daily walk I’d look over across a pond to the swamp maples, which are the the first to change, and see the amazing growth of color in the sun.

But then a passing cloud would drape a shadow

I prefer the colors to stand out, and a part of me called the second view downright dingy. But this would make a liar out of the part of myself that states the beauty is there for eyes to see, so I strove to see it. But then I was put to the test, as we were hit by a long spell of various sorts of gloom, cloud, drizzle and dampness.  Even as the foliage grew more brilliant the weather grew more gloomy.

I figured I’d likely miss the swamp maples at their most brilliant, and have to wait for the sugar maples, but then I noticed the weather was so wet the sugar maple leaves were rotting as much as they were changing color.

Then I heard motorcycles roar past one gray morning, and knew for them to be out leaf-peeping it had to be dry, though very gray, and as I headed off to do chores in an adjoining town I made plans to sidetrack into some swamps. I had a sense it was “now or never”.

All you need to do is pull over and slosh a little into the sedge to have the color engulf you.

If you are not careful you may become enchanted, wander into hidden valleys, and go unseen for twenty years like Rip Van Winkle.

Soon you forget CNN or Drudge. You are visiting a utterly different swamp.

And once you have found beauty on a cloudy day, a clear day is sheer heaven.

LOCAL VIEW –Beech Buds–

There’s a mist up in the maples;
There’s a hueing of the trees.
Let the farmer plant his staples;
Let the banker seek his ease.
Neither way will truly please.

I’m made hobo by the woodlands.
I’m made cross-eyed by the trees.
Schoolboys don’t have to be good. Man’s
Made rules ban ecstasies,
And his goals are but a tease.

In the treetops there’s no fading
Above glades that know no shading.
Farmers sweat, as bankers promise.
Schoolboy’s are the Doubting Thomas.

Last week we had but a single glory day, with skies as blue as promises, before the dreary and cold weather clamped back down. This is typical of the hills of New Hampshire. During my boyhood among the flatlanders of Massachusetts I came to expect spring to bust out in April, but I’ve learned not to expect it before May, this far north. We live right at the boundary of a sort of change in climate zones. Here is where Indians stopped attempting to grow corn, and became hunters.

Rather than April being a month where spring busts out, it tends to be a torture. Trees aren’t stupid, and they look both ways before crossing over into summer. The maples start to be hazed by their buds in early April, but they only tantalize, for what seems like forever. A sort of mist rides the tips of twigs, golden green over sugar maples and raspberry over swamp maples, and I’ve learned to appreciate the beauty…….about 5% of the time. The rest of the time it seems like way too much foreplay.

This is especially true when April holds long spells of dank weather, which is often the case. Snow can mix in with the rain right into May on the most torturous years. A sort of war goes on between the powers of rebirth and the powers of rot. (If you plant corn, beans or squash too early, that is exactly what their seeds do: rot.)

To really rub it in, last week the children asked me questions, and I had no answers. Rather than seeing this as an opportunity to teach how life never gets old, and is always full of new things, I just felt I was failing to live up to my reputation for being amazingly knowledgeable. Rot even was effecting my brain. For example, a child asked me, “What animal is this from?”

(Oh the irony! Here it is April, and rather than the fresh and new, I am consulted about an old bone. ) I had to confess I didn’t know. My guess was it was an old pig bone, and then, to hide my ignorance, I pointed out the gnawing marks left by deer mice, and also disseminated a bit about scientists who know their bones.

The next question was about foam coming from the side of a tree.

 Again I had to confess I had no clue. I had noticed it before, but never had come across an explanation in my reading. So I made a guess. I had wondered, when I saw it before, if it was rising sap fermenting in the tunnel made by some sort of wood-boring beetle. Sounds good, at any rate. But then curiosity killed the cat. I googled “foam on trees”, and discovered it was “slime flux”, and caused by bacteria. So then, on top of admitting I didn’t know, I had to admit my wild guess scientific hypothesis was wrong, which no thinker enjoys doing.

Not the best day. Rather than the fresh and new, I get brought bones and bacteria, and get my fat ego humbled to boot.

In such situations I find it best to retreat from my position as an authority figure, and to just do my job, which is to watch the kids. Call it licking-my-wounds if you will, but it is what I do when it is not the best day.

When I am sulking in this manner I like to turn to old,reliable ways of cheering myself up, for example noticing the beauty of red maple blossoms.

This is what mists the treetops raspberry.  They are so small few notice them.

They also make an interesting nibble, though I prefer the golden-green blooms of the sugar maple, but they weren’t out yet. Then I got a craving for beech buds, and sauntered over to a low hanging branch, and noticed something interesting. The buds were especially plump.

When I unwrapped the fat bud I discovered it was fatter than usual because rather than leaves it held a flower.

This is likely just another sign of rot. Our beech trees are stressed by a virus from Eurasia. When a tree is stressed, it makes nuts like crazy, attempting to reproduce before it dies. And now our beech trees are going the way of the American elm, chestnut, and butternut. Thank you very much, Internationalists. Our squirrels will starve. But we will have our revenge. An exploding population of American gray squirrels is running roughshod over the landscapes of Eurasia. (And it serves them right.)

As I contemplated this situation in my grumpy manner I absentmindedly nibbled the beech bud,  and was surprised how good it was. The flowers sweeten the flavor. Then I remembered my job. I was suppose to be watching the kids, and they had become suspiciously quiet.

When I turned I saw I was a teacher, after all. I saw a line of quiet children strung out behind me like ducklings, or perhaps like small monkeys behind a daddy gorilla. They were all nibbling beech buds.

I figured that, if I’m stuck with the job, I’d better do it right, so I taught them, “You don’t want to eat too many of those things, or it will make your tongue feel all hairy.”

(Yet another little-known-fact from my vast store of wisdom.)

[Photo credits for “old bone” and “foaming tree” pictures go to Marlowe Gautreau.]

LOCAL VIEW –Blighted Spring–

It’s been a drudging sort of week, full of duties one doesn’t plan for. Not much is blooming, but perhaps clouds of pollen from southern lands blew north, and everyone began sneezing. Or perhaps it was the common cold passing through town. In any case, who plans for that? It complicates things, and makes you make mistakes. Who plans for that? In your hurry you leave your key in the ignition, on the “on” position, as you are only hurrying inside for five minutes. But five minutes becomes two hours with phone-calls and other stuff, and when you hurry back to your car with an armload of other stuff, and are ready to rocket off, the battery is dead. Who plans for that?

We got by. Yesterday my battery was dead, but I wasn’t late to open the Farm-childcare as I got a quick jump from my wife’s car. Today her battery was dead at the Childcare, but she got a jump from me. To me it seemed very symbolic of how we get by, when we are not at our best.

Personally, I blame the delayed spring. Not that I wasn’t expecting it. Why? I think it was a queer mix of science and intuition and memory. I just noticed how a band of colder weather gave colder winters to places like Mexico and Syria and Thailand, even as places further north got a warmer winter, and I figured that band of colder weather would retreat north and get us. Meanwhile I recalled warm early springs in my past that got clobbered by May snowstorms, the worst being in 1977. Lastly, when you live as far north as New Hampshire, among Finns who immigrated here from much further north, you own a certain caution about warmth in March. Call it pragmatism or call it cynicism, I planted peas earlier than ever, but wasn’t surprised when snows followed, with record-setting cold.

But it needs to be said that such flip-flopping of weather is cruel. I am not being a selfish human, as I say this. It is not merely humans who get blighted. I can offer photographic evidence of the day-lily leaves with brown points, and the daffodils broken by frost.

Of course these are imported species, (as are Finns and even Yankees like myself), but what really impressed me was a local swamp maple that seemed to get fooled. It formed a purple misted tree, in the post I did about frogs singing early, back in March. Currently it looks like it isn’t even going to start budding. I may do a post about what happens with that tree, but I’ll have to wait and see.

In any case, though spring seemed ready to bust out in March, here it is a month later and the treeline looks pretty leafless.

However though the spring can be delayed, it cannot be denied. On the blighted lawn purple splashes.

And a few daffodil were more cautious, and now stand proud for being cowards.

And the grey fur of the pussy willow suddenly is yellow with pollen.

And the wiser, more cowardly swamp maples now venture to bloom.

And these tiny flowers, softening the treeline with a haze of reddish purple, always are worth a closer look.

However, though my heart is softened by the loveliness, I will not be a sucker and a chump. I remember snows in May. So I look to the black cherry trees. In Washington DC their cherries may be fools, and come out only to be blasted by frost, but I like to think our northern cherries are smarter. And even this late they are only budding.

So here I stand, betwixt and between. Spring will not be denied, but will not be a dunce.

The trees are distrustful; the very buds
Are reluctant; yet sneaking through the brush
Is a quickening of all creature’s bloods;
A hope that makes the grayest banker blush.

Who are you? Elf or zephyr or angel;
Invisible dancer swirling dead leaves;
You put us all through a long, slow, strange hell
Where the more one doubts the more one believes.

Logic dictates we distrust, and yet you
Seduce us with memories of past times
When you beat back that logic. Can you do
It again? In the face of this world’s crimes
Can you undo the loss of virginity?
Do that, and Oh! What a spring it would be!

Local View –A choir of quackers–

Spring is way ahead of last year, for we have already heard our first quacker frogs. I heard them on March 24, and brought a small child who moved up here from Arizona to the side of the road to hear them. Last year I first heard them on April 16, and I remember there was still a bit of ice on the north side of the pond where I heard them.

They are not as shrill and overpowering as spring peepers, which is the first frog most notice. The quackers are more subtle, and when a car goes sighing by on the road the car drowns out the sound of them. In fact our Childcare usually drowns out the sound of them, which is why I brought the small girl to listen alone. If you bring many children they are too loud, and if you bring the dog it charges ahead and all you see is many ripples in the pools.

The quackers actual name is “wood frog”, but that is rather a drab name for an amazing critter. They can be frozen, and then come back to life. I can’t, though I’ve come close, and I always appreciate those who can outdo me, even if they are just a frog.

When I was younger I called them “banjo frogs”, (before I learned real banjo frogs live in Australia). The sound of their voices is somewhere between a banjo and a quacking duck. However all recordings I found make them sound much louder than they actually are.

Their entire strategy seems to be: To be done with the entire business of reproducing before the rest of the animal community knows what hit them. They breed in forest melt-water pools that are often dry by the end of May. Their eggs hatch into tadpoles that hop off as frogs in a matter of days. However in order to do this they have to be right in the woods, so they skip the bother of burrowing in the mud at the bottom of ponds to hibernate. They burrow down in the forest floor and allow themselves to be frozen solid. Or, actually, not quite solid. The center of their bodies contains some sort of natural antifreeze and never entirely freezes (or, if it does, they don’t survive.) If you’re interested, there is a fairly good post here:

http://www.dogonews.com/2015/3/19/tiny-wood-frogs-survive-winter-by-partially-freezing-their-bodies

And there is a melodramatic PBS YouTube video (with the overdone PBS music) showing a quacker thawing out here:

However in the actual woods there is no PBS music. Thank heavens. There is just the silence of a sunny day, with the forest floor brilliant as the closest thing to shade is the swamp maples, barely beginning to bud.And on the sunny forest floor is what is barely more than a puddle, reflecting the sky. And from that water you suddenly hear the soft, strange sound of something utterly unlike PBS music. It is reminiscent of a duck playing the banjo, however, as you’ve never heard a duck play the banjo, it a music unto itself, so soft that if the wind stirs leaves and sighs in the pines it can be drowned out. But when the wind quiets the sound stirs something in you, and you too are awakened. And it is then you cannot stay quiet, are inspired to write words to drown out the PBS music.

Before the geese make eyes wild by calling,
Before the first bluebirds make soft hearts weep,
Before spring’s strength is enthralling
The brown woods stir from their long, frozen sleep
And a strange music plucks from new, black mud
And ripples the waters of forest pools.

Too quiet to surge ones long unstirred blood
And too quaint to make austere men be fools
It is a background to a bright prophecy
Like a quiet herb in a warm mother’s love-soup.

I take a small child to hear it with me;
To watch her face, as time loops the loop
And see as she sees life’s not forsaking
The bleak; Instead the bleak are awaking.

LOCAL VIEW –For Missus and For Sythia–

Photo Credit:  http://www.instesre.org/TemperateClimate/TemperateClimate.htm

This past week has seen a reversion to wintry weather, with frost on the windshields and ice in the puddles. The budding trees have hit the brakes, and the ponds have gone nearly silent.

Back when the weather was more kindly, on April 16, I heard the first frogs, which are not the spring peepers but another small frog I’ve heard called “banjo frogs” (perhaps because they make a “Twank” sound,  a bit like a breaking banjo string). (The Australian frog with the same name actually sounds more like a banjo.) I call them “spring quackers” because they also sound a bit like ducks. They are lower and quieter than peepers, and always seem to beat the peepers by a day or two, when it comes to announcing the ponds are coming back to life. They are far less obvious than the peepers are. Where the peepers peep is piercing and shrill, the quackers are more of a low muttering, almost subliminal.

At our childcare I asked a small girl, around age three, if she could hear them, and at first she shook her head. Then her eyes changed, and she tilted her head, and looked off curiously through the trees. I asked her if she’d like to sneak closer, and she nodded. (Most kids like to sneak.) Then we crept through the pines, and it was wonderful to watch the child’s face fill with wonder as we drew closer and the plaintive “twanking” became more obvious. However then my idiot dog came lunging through the underbrush, plunging along the side of the pond to see what we were up to, and the frogs immediately became silent and the water ahead was dimpled with rings of ripples. I told the girl my dog wasn’t very good at sneaking, and she nodded.

By the next day the peepers had started their shrieking, and all the subtlety was lost.  They demand attention, which doesn’t seem a very good survival strategy, until you sneak up on them and understand they confuse predators by being both numerous and deafening. It is hard to locate a single frog by its peep, with so many other peeps coming at you from all angles. And they also become immediately silent, if you move too fast. I find them amazingly difficult to locate. They are also amazingly loud, once you see how small they are.

(Photo credit: Mike Marchand.)

They also can stand being frozen solid, due to some sort of antifreeze in their blood. This was a good thing, as the promise of spring seemingly became a lie.

Just as the first frogs are tiny, so are the first blooms on the swamp maples, which are the first tree to bud out. The lowlands go from being silvery thickets to being touched by a raspberry mist I have yet to see captured by a photograph, but you have to poke your nose close to see how lovely the individual flowers are.

(Photo credit: https://piedmontgardener.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/maple-flowers-and-buds.jpg )

Ours are a bit more purple than the the flowers pictured above, and they look a lot worse after they’ve been blasted by frost. I’m going to watch, to see if they make many seeds this year.  We got into a northwest flow on Tuesday that wouldn’t quit, and were still in it on Friday.

A few flakes were in the roaring wind on Wednesday, and Thursday’s purple clouds kept pelting us with white, Dr. Seuss pompoms of  fluffy hail called “graupel”, and Friday morning began with a whirling flurry that briefly made the view look like January, though it never stuck to the ground. It was not weather conducive to ambition, in the garden, which turned out to be a good thing, for my  wife had other ambitions.

I wound up repairing the fence in front of the house, as the winter’s plows trashed what little was left of the old one. I fear I spend so much time over at the farm that I neglect my home, and the lack of care shows, and annoys my wife. The Memorial Day parade comes down Main Street and passes right in front of our house, and my wife doesn’t believe me when I say all eyes are on the parade and not our house. Consequently I spend time every spring at home, sprucing the place up, right when I feel I should be gardening.

There actually was a parade this morning, but as usual I always forget it, and get a shock. At the start of the baseball season the children are marched from the fire station to the ball field with blaring fire engines and police cars, and every year I think it is a terrorist attack.

After watching my grandson in his first game my ambition was to nap, but my middle son has the ambition to grow pear trees and see if he can start a microbrewery making a sort of pear cider called “perry”.  This is a long-term project, but in the short term involves planting four trees at the childcare, and also involves controlling my goats, so they don’t eat his saplings. This in turn involved repairing the electric fence, so that is what I wound up doing rather than snoozing.  Rather than rested I wound up feeling as you’d expect, after fighting with cold wire in a cold wind.

My ambition is now to simply survive until noon Monday. Sunday will not be a day of rest for me, as I am giving the sermon at our church. We have dwindled to a size so small that, fort the first time in 265 years, we can’t afford a pastor or interim pastor, and instead have “guest speakers” which includes our selves, (as we are cheapest) (IE free). We don’t call our sermons sermons, but rather call them “messages”, but mine will be a sermon all right.

My “message” is liable to be grouchy, as I have to fast on clear fluids, and then later in the day flush out my system and spend a lot of my time on the toilet, as my doctor wants to have a look inside my colon first thing Monday morning. It is hard to be happy about this prospect. A man of my advanced years expects to be treated with more dignity than that, especially right after giving a sermon at church.

It is also hard to see much prospect of Spring busting out.  We need south winds, as we are surrounded by cold in other directions. The Great Lakes still have ice, and there is still an amazing four feet of snow not all that far to our north. (The purple areas in the Dr Ryan Maue map below, from Joseph D’Aleo’s site at Weatherbell.)

It is hard to see much hope in the current map, with the warm rains suppressed so far to the south.

 However with the sun as high as it is in mid-August, spring is only seemingly denied. This morning, even with a skim of ice on puddles, when a beam of sun pooled in the east-facing shallows of the pond, a single peeper let out a solitary yelp. And I remind myself the ice was still thick enough to walk upon, on April first. Things have melted; spring isn’t denied.

The buds only seem on hold. Trees are very smart, for a being without brains, and they know when to bust out all over. The forsythia is yellower every day, even without blooming, and, even as I stood sulking by my garden yesterday, a bluebird landed on a fence-post nearby. It’s hard to argue with that.

POSTSCRIPT

The “spring quackers” are officially called “wood frogs”, and sound like this: