Today we bid farewell to the interminable month of February. March arrives at midnight tonight and I’m glad to see it come. But March can be a mean month. Twenty of its days still officially belong to winter, but winter almost always stays for the whole month and then some. In a good year, we will have snowdrops and crocuses before March ends. Some years we have to wait until April. I’m hoping this will be a good year.
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| Monday |
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| Tuesday |
The week began with a winter storm. February seemed determined to torture us with ice and snow during her remaining days. Five new inches of snow fell on Monday and another two on Tuesday. Shoveling seemed futile in the onslaught. All the paths Hannah had so laboriously dug disappeared. The township plows were diligent in keeping our road clear, but in doing that, they push up a bank of snow across the end of our driveway that makes it difficult for us to get in and out. It seemed like every time we dug out, they came by a few minutes later and undid what had been done. Later in the week it warmed a bit, but not enough to melt much snow. It rained on the snow and then re-froze making hard lumpy ice everywhere. The paths where we walk from the back porch to the cars and the paths to the barn are like little glaciers, full of miniature crevasses, treacherous tiny ice flows and ponds. I’m ready for it all to go away.
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| Treacherous pathways. |
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| Wednesday |
I’ve been waiting for weeks for a thaw to come so I can prune the orchard. We often get a January thaw, but not this year. Late February is my usual pruning time and I prefer to do it on a somewhat mild day when the snow level has declined a bit. The forecast said it would be in the 40's and sunny on Wednesday, so I hoped that would be the day. I sharpened my favorite Felco No. 8 pruning shears and watched the thermometer, waiting for the world to warm. By 1:00 the temperature had risen to a pleasant 47° and a soft breeze was blowing. I headed out toward the orchard, but the snow was still three feet deep and it was exhausting to trudge through it. I gave up and came back inside just before it started to rain. Then it got cold again. So pruning will have to wait until a March thaw comes, if one comes. At least I know that as long as the weather stays cold, the trees will remain dormant.
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| My favorite Felco No. 8 pruners. |
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| Trudging toward the orchard. |
Down in the barn, the chickens have also been waiting. They’ve been shut inside the barn since the end of November. The coop is big enough that they have lots of room to move around in and they don’t like going out in the snow anyway, but I can tell they are feeling the approach of spring and want to be out and about. One of the hens, Lola, has gone broody already. It’s too early for her to set, so I’ve been taking the eggs out from under her every day, much to her annoyance. I’ve been getting 15 to 20 eggs steadily all winter and as the days get longer, that number will go up. I put up my Eggs for Sale sign again in anticipation. The peacock has a beautiful long tail now, but he won’t display it inside the confines of the barn. We can hardly wait to let him out so we can watch him show off. We’ll be getting new chicks later in the spring. That’s a happy thought.
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| The peacock and company. |
The last week of February was proving to be pretty tedious. I wasn’t called in to school all week, a rarity. I had five sign orders to work on, but that involves a lot of time waiting for paint to dry. There wasn’t anything I could do outdoors. And so I turned to books and music, my usual forms of mental stimulation, to keep from succumbing to cabin fever. I continued reading and finished The Pilgrim’s Progress. I really enjoyed it. It was different from anything I’ve ever read. Once I finished that, I had to find a new book. This time I found one without too much trouble, in fact, I have eleven books in my queue now.
In 1982 I watched a miniseries on PBS’s Great Performances, an adaptation of a book called Brideshead Revisited, a book I’d never heard of, by an author I’d also never heard of, a man named Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966). I loved the miniseries and was intrigued by the unexplored territory of a new author. I went down to the bookstore and bought eleven paperback books by him: Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), Scoop (1938), Put Out More Flags (1942), Brideshead Revisited (1945), The Loved One (1948), Men At Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), and The End of the Battle (1961). Then I went on a binge and read all of them. I loved Waugh’s style and his satirical wit. When I finished all eleven books, I put them on my shelf and never read them again. Over the years I’ve looked at the spines of those books hundreds of times and remembered how much I enjoyed them. It’s been almost 40 years now and I’ve decided to read them again. Plus, I’ve found there are other titles by Waugh I haven’t read, so I will find them, add them to my Waugh collection, and read them too. Evelyn Waugh is considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, and yet I don’t think he’s widely read anymore. I’m reading them in chronological order by publication date. This will be fun.
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| My collection of Waugh. |
For my musical stimulation last week, I decided to explore the world of the violin concerto. I am very familiar with many of them. I adore Bach’s three violin concertos. I listen to them frequently. Brahms’ violin concerto is one of my favorite pieces of music, as is Mendelssohn’s perfect and brilliant second concerto. Max Bruch also wrote three and I love them. I also know well the concertos of Mozart, Beethoven, and Vivaldi, but there were many concertos by other composers that I did not know. So I did some research and made a chart, listing composers in alphabetical order. Over four days I found and listened to each concerto (thanks to YouTube) and then rated them. My classical music tastes are pretty conservative, but I wanted to be open minded and give even some of the more modern and radical composers a chance. It turned out to be a great adventure. I found that I prefer mostly 18th and 19th century music, but there were a few surprises in the 20th century. Of course, some of them were not to my liking at all. For a real treat, go to YouTube and listen to violinist Hilary Hahn play some of these.
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| My concerto chart. |
Here is a teaser of Hilary Hahn playing the opening of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.
Once warmer weather comes, I won’t have as much time indoors to go on these long mental adventures. I always read far fewer books between April and October than I do from November to March. I’m looking forward to being outdoors and active again, but in a way I will miss these literary and musical excursions. But winter will always come again and I will have plenty of time to resume my diversions again.
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| Late February sunrise. |
Friday was the Jewish holiday of Purim (actually it began on Thursday night). It is celebrated every year on the 14th of the Hebrew month of Adar which this year fell on February 25th and 26th. Purim commemorates the salvation of the Jewish people in the ancient Persian empire in the 5th century B.C. from wicked Haman’s plot to destroy all the Jews, young and old, infants and women, in a single day. The word purim means “lots” in ancient Persian. The holiday is called that because Haman threw lots to determine when he would carry out his diabolical scheme. The story of Purim and its Jewish heroine, Queen Esther (her Hebrew name is Hadassah), is recorded in the Megillah, the Book of Esther. During Purim the Jews go to the synagogue and tell the story by reading the entire Book of Esther (10 chapters in our Bible, about 10 pages), thus giving us the phrase, “the whole Megillah,” meaning telling a long, involved story told in great detail. It is a happy party holiday for the Jews, full of fun traditions. We don’t usually do anything for Purim at our house, but we love the story. Miriam, whose middle name is Esther, always watches the movie One Night With the King, a retelling of the story. She watched it on Friday while she made us a traditional Purim treat, cookies called Hamentaschen (Haman’s Ears). The cookies were delicious.
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| A selection of Miriam's Hamentaschen. |
Today on the way to and from church, we saw lots of robins, but they were all up in New York. I’m sure we’ll see some here in Gold as soon as we have some open ground. The only place on our property where we can see the bare ground right now is the patch above the septic tank. It is just warm enough today that it is raining instead of snowing (36°). That means the snow is even slushier and uglier than it was. It just needs to melt and be gone. I can almost hear those spring flowers yearning to be free.
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| The only open spot of ground in our yard. |
Dan
