Many
a reader who wanted to read a tale through was not able to do it because of
delays on account of the weather. Nothing breaks up an author's progress like
having to stop every few pages to fuss-up the weather. Thus it is plain that
persistent intrusions of weather are bad for both reader and author.
Mark Twain, The American Claimant
This has been a winter when there has been
little to write about except the weather, and that little often modified by
weather delays. In fact, it has been the coldest February ever recorded here in
eastern Ontario, and January wasn’t much better. So, as Mark Twain points out,
persistent intrusions of weather are just plain annoying. In real life, as well
as in art, hmm?
Not entirely. Some of us have been having a
small competition on Facebook as to whose piles of snow were the highest, whose
photographing fingers the coldest, whose woodpile depleting the fastest. Fun. I
think everyone I read has had a win in at least one category. I also think
enough is enough and if I don’t see at least an icicle within the next few
days, I am emigrating. To the equator, or close by.
It has been a short and sobering month,
February as well as icy cold. There have been the deaths of a cousin I knew
well in our school days, of a good and long time friend and of the husband of a
wonderful neighbour, all within the last few weeks, plus the funeral of the
father of a fine man with whom I worked for some years. At the beginning of the
month JG caught norovirus in his mother’s nursing home and ended up so sick
that I called an ambulance to haul him into the Emergency Room to get
rehydrated. He was not happy with this, but he is now fine and back to chopping
down trees, so I feel justified. Scary call to have to make.
In more quiet hours I have spent a lot of
time sorting photographs, both from our Hawaii trip and of the land around
here, I have not done the mending (stop laughing!) and I have refilled and
rescattered bird feeders and deer food on at least a daily basis. The birds
have shown themselves as fluffy balls of appetite and the deer stand at the edge of the field waiting for the
sound of the tops coming off the corn and deer feed containers, surging in
toward the feeding station often before I have walked out of sight.
Lately we also have a huge solo male turkey
hanging around the feeding station tempting fate. Easter is coming and so is
the hunting season for Tom turkeys. This one is safe from me, though. I had a
turkey that size to cook at Christmas and it is only just lately, praise be, that it is finally finished. I
hauled the last container of turkey pie makings out of the freezer on the
weekend and made two pies, the remnant of one leaving my kitchen with
remarkable speed in the hands of my YD, and the other providing a meal for a
neighbour and her cat. And the turkey soup was a success at a Hall card party.
If I do Christmas next year, it is going to feature a small turkey. A very
small turkey. I am too old to be haunted by leftovers.
It is a gorgeous blue-skied day today. I
squint when I look out my office window, and if my clothesline were not sagging
into the snow piled underneath it, I think I would have hung out the wash. Soon
now, quite soon, I will be able to do that, the roads will turn to muddy mush,
the birds will start courting and the sap will run. Tomorrow would have been my
grandmother’s birthday and should have been the ED’s birthday had she not
arrived so very, very late. Would we have called her Irene if she had? It
certainly would have been a distinctive name in the ‘60’s.
I note, having had a lot of time to read
silly stuff this last chilly while, that my name, Mary, reached it’s top in popularity in
the ‘50’s and has dropped away off the bottom of popular names in North America
since then. I once worked a summer at a small residential art school where, of
the seven of us on staff, three were named Mary. It meant a good response when
the cook yelled. And that all of us ended up with double names for that summer.
I became Mary Pat, but was able to lose it as soon as the summer was over,
thank goodness. I was fifteen that summer and I remember much of it clearly and
with nostalgia. Was it also Mark Twain who said, famously, that youth is wasted
on the young?
And I think I have just spotted a baby
icicle starting to grow. Maybe the snow is shrinking under the clothes line as
well.
