Springtime

It came fast this year. Three weeks ago a foot and a half of snow covered everything. It's all gone now and has been for a week or so. The red polls and pine grosbeaks are gone. Juncos and purple finches are back. One day two robins were on the lawn, today a sparrow. The rabbits are neither white nor brown, but a blotchy tan. In winter I see them mostly in the middle of the night, just a flicker of shadow, white movement on white snow. Now they chase each other on the edges of the woods until Bear notices them. Our one last hen is venturing into the woods edge also and I fear for her. Our nearest neighbor has turkeys and chickens. Bear has been finding turkey feet and other unrecognizeable turkey parts on our walks through the woods. We have also seen pecked open brown eggs on our road and the woods trail. I think the ravens we've seen circling so often are after those eggs, not the goat corpse in our woods. We hear our neighbor shooting at them sometimes. Brown, the goat, is getting more and more friendly and companionable since the snow is gone and he can get around the yard better. I used to talk to my golden retriever, Molly, all day long. She was a wonderful listener. I can't talk to Bear that way. She's much too busy. If someone keeps running off when you start to speak, it seems like you're boring them. But luckily I've found that Brown is a good confidant. He ambles along behind me and even bleats in agreement occasionally. Break-up, also known as mud season, was relatively brief this year. (Unless it's back. We've had a good rain.) We had one very bad mud wallow on our road. Now that we have a reliable four-wheel drive vehicle, we don't have as much trouble as we once did. Three of our neighbors cars were parked out beyond the wallow. They had to walk back and forth to their houses. During break-up, the UPS man keeps in touch with his cell phone. If your road is bad he leaves your package at the grocery store in town. If your road is good, but your driveway is bad he leaves it on the hood of your car. Your car is parked at the far end of your driveway because you can't drive on it either. Our nights have been in the forties this week. I have four long south facing windows with deep sills upstairs in our house. They are full of geraniums: red, pink, and scented. It's tempting to carry them all down into my little greenhouse now. I could use the window sills for all the little plants I'm starting inside. But surely we'll have nights in the twenties again. I don't want to spend too much money heating the greenhouse. I usually only start using it in May. And if our nights don't dip below freezing again? Uh oh. Early mosquitoes.