May Day

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 1^st, and, yes, spring. Finally.

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.

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.