There is a fine and well-tuned chorus of spring
peepers this evening, in full throat for the first time this spring. Earlier,
as they were warming up, they provided a back-up for a robin’s triumphant solo
with all the grace notes and considerable volume. I was out on the porch a
short while ago (9:00 pm ish) and the sky was still blue well after sunset and
a bright star (probably a planet, in truth) had been hung in the branches of
the oak tree. May 1st, and, yes, spring. Finally.
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| Lots of buds |
In fact, my daffodils are finally deciding that they
are going to bloom after all. We had a day yesterday of soft rain and the back
field turned green and the tight, cold-rejecting buds in my bulb bed began to
take notice. Today a lot of the minis are in bloom and the whole bed begins to
look promising.
The oak tree is now the only tree in what I think of
as the front of our house, even if the front door is on the other side. Very
close to the screen porch there was a large and somewhat decrepit black cherry
and in front of that a clump of birch that had never really recovered after the
ice storm. To get the cherry to fall away from the house, JG had to cut the
birch away. So, down it came, and the cherry followed. Poor guy has just
finished raking up all the dead crunchy stuff that broke off when it was
felled, but it did land exactly where he had planned for it to go. He hauled
the trunk away while there was still snow on frozen ground and cut it up. Today
he split some of it and remarked that there was a lot of rot in the lower trunk.
Good thing he got it down. But it does change the view from the screen porch.
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| The two stumps, one centre and one just showing to the right of the oak trunk are the new cuts. |
Word Nanny wants me to put a comma after ‘But’ in the
sentence above, but I am not going to do it. That is how I write and I WANT
that to be two sentences. Word Nanny is just about as unreasonable as my Grade
13 English teacher sometimes. If I want to be colloquial, it is for a reason. Damn
it! And I will swear if I want to. This is a blog, not an erudite essay. I
still recall that teacher with a mixture of horror and amusement. Her name was
McIntosh. We had Macbeth as our Shakespearean play and the woman hung a
wooden knife from a light fixture when she read us the ‘Is that a dagger …”
speech. Honest. She did. Ever after, we referred to her as Mac the Knife.
Um, where was I? Oh yes, May, spring, flowers and
song. There will be a half moon along before very long. We have a small flock
of turkeys wandering in and out of the back field, mostly to check out the
feeding station to see if the deer left then any corn. The male is hopefully
displaying and pacing and the females are paying him absolutely no attention
whatsoever. Poor guy.
I took out the corn and deer ration to the feeding
rock this afternoon and there was a doe who just stood close by and watched me
set up the piles. As soon as I stepped away, four more, all does, simply materialized
out of the bush. I had made five piles. Three deer trotted up and started
eating. The fourth ignored her pile and chased the smallest of the five away
from the rock. Mean. The deer are not quite as horrid to one another as the
hummingbirds, but the fully adult does can be pretty ugly to the smaller ones.
I have to rummage through the storage room and find
the hummer feeders asap. There is forsythia out in Perth, I am told, so the
hummers will be along. No trillium yet. One mosquito in the kitchen at supper
time. Ah, spring.
