All the Easter guests left early in the week, the Thayns on Sunday night, the Murrays on Monday morning. It was very quiet after that. Monday was a chilly, gray day, which enhanced the feeling of post holiday malaise. I spent the morning doing a post-guest tidy time. I did laundry. I fussed with my orchids. I tried to lift the bleak mood that had settled on the house by playing some music. I put on a queue of my favorite rock hits from the 70's, the music of my teen years and, in my opinion, the greatest age of rock music. I listened for an hour while I worked, but the music had a strange effect on me. It was too nostalgic. I had to switch to something else. Next I tried my favorite country hits from the 80's and 90's. Same reaction. Finally I queued up Mozart, the divertimenti, and that did the trick – graceful, cheerful music from two hundred and fifty years ago.
Monday afternoon the weather cleared and the garden work immediately commenced. Kurt got out the tractor and tilled sections of the big garden. I burned brush. I love the look of a clean, freshly tilled garden. We have rows ready now for the first planting, onions – if it stops raining long enough for things to dry out a bit.
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| Kurt tilling on Monday afternoon. |
So it’s April. Two of the things that make April famous, April Fools’ Day and April showers, were what last week was all about. The calendar says it’s spring? April Fools! Let’s have it snow a bit more! And when it’s not snowing, let’s have lots of cold rain showers. With all that precipitation, I’m feeling pretty entitled to the May flowers that are supposed to follow. We’ll see how that plays out. Right now the crocuses and snowdrops are finished, helped on to an early demise by the snow that buried them repeatedly. The daffodils and hyacinths have been delayed by poor weather. Only the squill and the chionodoxa, tiny but bright, are blooming.
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| A patch of squill. |
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| A patch of chionodoxa. |
The origin of April Fools’ Day intrigued me, so I did a little research and found that historians don’t agree on why or when it began. Some say it goes all the way back to Roman times and the festival of Hilaria, which happened at the end of March and involved dressing up in costumes and making fun of people. Most think it started sometime in the 16th century. Whenever it began, I’m not keen on practical jokes, so I’ve never been a big fan of the day. One thing I have loved about the day since childhood are the April Fools paintings done by Norman Rockwell for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. We had a book of Rockwell’s paintings when I was growing up and his April Fools covers fascinated me. They are full of whimsical, clever, puns and paradoxes. I used to love to sit and muse over them. I still do.
“April showers bring May flowers” has a more definite origin. The poem as we know it today first appeared in 1557 in a short poem by English farmer and poet Thomas Tusser (1524 – 1580), who in his collected writings titled, A Hundred Good Points of Husbandry, wrote: “Sweet April showers Do spring May flowers.” Most scholars believe that Tusser was probably inspired by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, whose Prologue begins:
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour, And bathed every vein in such liquid
Of which vertu engendred is the flour; By which power the flower is created;
Fools and showers and the hope of flowers describe perfectly how I felt last week. I felt the fool for thinking we were done with winter. I was unable to do much work in the garden because of the showers. And the few flowers that were trying to bloom seemed sad. And that all brought to mind the song April Showers.
Still it holds a goodly share of bliss,
When the sun gives way to April showers,
Here is the point you should never miss.
Though April showers may come your way,
They bring the flowers that bloom in May,
So if it's raining have no regrets,
Because it isn't raining rain you know, it's raining violets.
And where you see clouds upon the hills,
You soon will see crowds of daffodils,
So keep on looking for a bluebird,
And list'ning for his song,
Whenever April showers come along.
The most famous rendition of that song was sung by Al Jolson in 1932, but the one I know best was sung by Bugs Bunny in 1962. I find it a bit strange that so much of my cultural knowledge comes from Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes.
The showers began Monday night and went on through the day Tuesday. I spent most of Tuesday doing something I’d never done before – rendering tallow. In years past, when we’ve raised pigs, I rendered lard, but I’d never done beef tallow. We came into some beef with all the fat and, after watching some videos on YouTube, I felt confident about rendering tallow. In the process of doing that, I discovered that the way I did lard was not the best way, so I decided to improve my rendering skills with this beef fat. I chopped it up as finely as I could, set it in a big pot with some added water on low heat, and let it simmer and melt for several hours. At first it smelled good, like I was cooking a nice fatty roast, but after a while, I got sick of the smell. After two hours, I poured it all through cheese cloth to take out the solid bits and then, following instructions, I let it cool. After it was hard, I scraped it into the pot again, added more water and let it melt and simmer again. That is what they call washing the tallow. The water boils off and it makes the tallow more pure. I repeated the washing process three times and ended up with some nice, fine tallow. We are getting pigs again this year and now I feel ready to render lard again, but that won’t happen until fall.
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| Jars of finished tallow. |
Later that afternoon when I did the chores, I took the solid bits from the rendering down to the barn and threw them to the chickens. They went crazy for them. A lot of people don’t realize that chickens are omnivores. They eat just about anything they can get their beaks on, plant or animal. And they love to eat meat. I don’t feed meat to them very often, just when there are scraps of it from a meal. They are actually aggressive and ruthless hunters. I’ve seen them go after mice, baby birds, and frogs that happened into their domain. Those beef scraps were a great treat for them.
A big storm blew in Tuesday night. I was awakened many times during the night by wind howling and rain pelting the house. Wednesday morning I looked out expecting to see tree branches strewn across the yard or maybe my greenhouse blown away, but the only thing I noticed was that the creek across the road was running high. The rain and wind kept up all that day and I was trapped inside the house again.
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| Snow on the hills and the creek running high. |
Thursday was another grim day. It began cold and foggy. It had snowed during the night, but there was only a slight crust of it on the cars and on the very coldest parts of the ground. The forest high up on the hilltops was white with it. We attended a funeral that day for a sister in our branch, which occupied most of the afternoon. We got back from that in time for me to do the chores. And by then it was raining, of course.
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| Snow on the hill tops. |
The rain turned to snow during the night and Friday morning we awoke to find everything covered in a crust of sticky, wet snow again. The sun came out mid-morning and the snow began to melt, but there were little flurries all day long. It was another day spent not doing things I wanted and needed to do outdoors. Miriam and Hannah left that morning to spend the weekend in Toledo at Sarah’s house. On their way there, they picked up Rachel. They are having a sisters weekend. Tabor and the grandchildren came up here to spend the weekend with Stacey and me. It is nice having them here again so soon. They really liven things up. As a treat for them, I spent that morning making a big batch of tapioca pudding. I suppose, in truth, it was as much for me as it was for them. I love tapioca. Tabor and the children arrived at dinnertime. We had pizza and root beer floats for dinner and tapioca for dessert.
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| Friday morning. |
One exciting thing happened on Friday afternoon, one of my plant shipments arrived – trees for the orchard and strawberry plants and mushroom spawn. The mushroom spawn is something new for me. I’m going to grow three kinds, shitake, lion’s mane, and chicken of the woods. I love new garden adventures.
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| Mushroom spawn. |
Yesterday morning we woke up to snow again and, once again, it melted away by noon. Stacey made cinnamon rolls for breakfast, always a great treat. After breakfast, we went up to Wellsville to Runnings. I needed to buy chicken feed and everyone came along. We saw all the chicks. Russell was in heaven with all the tractors, four-wheelers, and other “brrrmm brrmm,” as he calls all vehicles. Tabor looked at fishing lures. And Runnings has a great candy section. We got back from that in time to unload the feed before General Conference began at noon. Between conference sessions, I planted my new trees – three apples, a cherry, a peach, and a dogwood. I was glad that the ground was thawed enough to plant them. The bed for the strawberries isn’t ready yet. Later in the afternoon another package arrived with my onion starts. It looks like I have a lot of planting to do this week. The weather looks like it will be nice and mild and perfect for planting, but there is a good chance for rain midweek, which might interfere.
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| Tabor and Russell on a "brmm brmm" at Runnings. |
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| Looking at chicks. |
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| Looking at chicks. |
This is General Conference weekend. We watched three sessions yesterday and one today. We will watch the last session which begins at 4:00. It has been a wonderful conference. There have been so many great and inspirational talks and the music, as always, was wonderful.
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| Sunset last night. |
Tomorrow is the solar eclipse. At our house we are at 99.35% totality so we are driving over to the town of Dunkirk, New York, on Lake Erie to see 100%. Miriam, Hannah, and Rachel are driving from Sarah’s house to meet us there. We’ll have a picnic lunch and celebrate Florence’s fourth birthday and watch the sun disappear for four minutes. We’re hoping the sky will be clear and that all the predictions about traffic jams and other catastrophes are just hype. We’ll see.
