Suddenly, we’ve come to the end of March. Today is the last Sunday of the month. March seemed to pass quickly to me. Now April looms just ahead with its promise of brighter days, opening flowers, and unfurling leaves. Last week the weather ran the whole early spring gamut – rain, snow, wind, warm (62°), cold (13°), and everything in between. We even had a little thunderstorm. Only one day, Thursday, was suitable for working outdoors. After school that day I did more pruning in the orchard. Kurt brought over his weed whacker with its long chain saw attachment and helped me take out some of the higher, thicker branches. I still have more pruning to do and I’m running out of time. The trees will be waking up soon. I just need a few days of reasonable weather to finish the job.
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| Working in the orchard. |
The flowerbeds are trying to bloom despite the weather’s attempts to thwart them. The purple crocuses have joined the early yellow ones. The iris reticulata are opening. The snowdrops are at their peak. And there are tulip, daffodil, allium, and squill shoots emerging all over the long borders. I bought new bulbs last fall – tulips, alliums, lilies, and fritillaries – and I don’t remember exactly where I planted them. They will be a surprise when they come up. I like surprises like that.
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| New purple crocuses. |
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| My favorite crocuses. |
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| My iris reticulata. |
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| One of many patches of snowdrops in the garden. |
A robin has taken up residence in our yard, a nice plump male, who seems to not mind being close to people. When I’m out in the yard, he will come quite close to me. If I pretend not to pay attention to him, I’ll see him out of the corner of my eye just a few feet away from me. I think he might be one of the robins that nested on the shelf under the eaves of the back porch last year. I love it when wild birds come near me. When I’m filling the feeders and the chickadees fly down and perch in the branches just above me or even come right to the feeder while I’m filling it, or when hummingbirds hover just a few feet in front of me – it thrills me. I have always felt that there is some hereditary memory of ancient Eden in me. I long to live in a condition like that before the Fall when Adam and Eve lived in harmonious peace with the animals and there was no enmity between mankind and the animals or between the animals themselves. The wickedness, violence, and turmoil of living in the Last Days makes me long for Millennial peace, a time when Christ will reign and the earth will be renewed and receive its paradisiacal glory. Then men “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks; Nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.” Then the enmity between humans and animals will cease and I will call the wild birds to me and they will not be afraid.
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| My robin friend. |
In the meantime, I have my flock. My chickens are not overly friendly to me. They only let me get so close before they get nervous. But as long as I keep my distance and move calmly, they let me sit in their company. Some of them are friendlier than others. There is a group of five hens who fly out of the chicken yard every day and wander the property. They keep to the front of the house and like to scratch in the leafy debris under the big front maples. In the afternoon as chore time approaches, the main body of the flock always congregates at the fence inside the chicken yard to watch for me and those five wandering hens gather outside the fence near them. When they see me come out onto the porch with the slop bucket and egg basket, the five run to greet me in mid-yard and then follow me back to the barn. I know it’s probably just my human vanity, but it seems to me that they are happy to see me. When I go into the upper part of the barn to get their feed, the five fly off the barn bridge and rejoin the flock. Chickens are interesting people.
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| Watching the flock from the barn bridge. |
These days, as soon I open the upper door on the barn, Posey our male peacock begins to trumpet. After molting all his tail feathers in the fall, he has grown a splendid new one. He and his hen, Petunia, are anxious to leave the barn and go to their bigger pen out in the orchard. We are going to improve and enlarge that pen, so Posey and Petunia will have to wait and they are getting impatient. Petunia will soon start laying eggs, so we need to get their new pen done soon. Maybe this week.
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| Posey and Petunia. |
In other bird news, two weeks ago I wrote about seeing a flock of tundra swans on the Waterwheel Pond down the road in Colesburg. They were only there a day or two and then they flew on north – except for one swan. We don’t know why it stayed behind. It might be sick or injured. It looks forlorn swimming there all by itself. There are other geese and ducks there, but the swan does not associate with them. It just swims by itself all day, feeding and floating. Poor thing.
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| The lone swan. |
Out in the woodshed, my seed trays are looking good. Seeds are sprouting and growing. It will soon be time to re-pot some of them into bigger pots. The potatoes I set out to chit have sprouted. This week I will start two more trays of seeds, one of cabbages and another of flowers. If the weather settles a bit, I will plant spinach and lettuce seeds out in raised beds in the vegetable garden this week.
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| My seed trays. |
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| Chitting potatoes. |
Last week I finished the third book in the travel trilogy written by Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Broken Road. I read the first two books (A Time of Gifts & Between the Woods and the Water) last year, but had to wait to read the third until I could buy a copy to add to my library. I mentioned the other two books in the Journal sometime back when I read them. The trilogy is the memoir of a walking tour 18 year old Fermor took starting from Holland in the winter of 1933 and ending at Mount Athos in Greece, in the spring of 1934. I loved these books. Fermor is a great writer. His descriptions of the places he visited and the people he met are wonderful. The books are also sad to me. The world Fermor knew in the 1930's was already vanishing as Europe was preparing to plunge into World War II. Fermor had little trouble crossing borders as he moved from country to country. And the people he met were, for the most part, very kind and hospitable to him. A person could never make the trip he took now. I suppose one of the reasons I loved these books is that once upon a time, when I was in my early twenties, I planned a trip to Europe, but never went. I’ve read about and studied parts of Europe over the years, so I know something about the history and culture of the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria, but through Fermor’s books I’ve also learned about places I knew very little about – Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey. I’d never even heard of Mount Athos before and now I want to go there. Fermor’s words have sparked a desire in me to travel and see what he saw, all the while knowing that those places are not like that anymore and I will never see them.
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| Patrick Leigh Fermor. |
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| The first part of Fermor's trip across Europe. |
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| The second part of the trip. |
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| Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain. |
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| One of the monasteries on Mount Athos. |
We’d planned to go down to the Thayn’s house for the weekend, but canceled again. We were going down to help Rachel with yard work, but there was no point with it being so chilly and rainy down there. Up here it was cold and snowy, so no yard work was done here either. When I saw the patchy snow on Saturday morning, I groaned and then set up a queue of big band music to cheer me up. I love to listen to big band music while tidying the house for the Sabbath. In the afternoon Stacey wanted to take a walk around the yard to look at the flowerbeds. By the time we set out, it was snowing. We made a quick circuit around the yard and made a hasty retreat indoors again. It snowed off and on all day, but it didn’t accumulate at all.
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| On our walk yesterday. |
This morning we awoke to a snowy world. It got cold enough in the night for the snow to stick. It wasn’t deep when we left for church, but there was enough of it to thoroughly disgust me. When we arrived at church we found there was hardly any snow in Wellsville. When we got home from church we could see that it had snowed while we were gone. There’s more than an inch of it now. The little flowers that had delighted me all week look so sad covered in the snow. We saw a lot of birds on our way to and from church. Because of the snow, all the robins are huddled along the roadsides. We saw hundreds of them. Then between Genesee and Gold we saw a bald eagle. And just as we were coming into Gold, a wild turkey flew across the road in front of us. Now we are home. It’s still snowing off and on. The wind has picked up and is blowing the snow around. We’re trying to decide what to have for lunch. I’m thinking it’s a great day for a long Sabbath nap.
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| Crocuses in the snow today. |
Good Sabbath!
