We’ve been having a heat wave. At first, we thought we’d just gotten the January thaw in February, but the temperature went up even more as we pulled into March. This week, we had some sixty-degree days and a peek at what seventy looks like. While taking full advantage of every warm moment, we understand that winter will be back. This is only March, after all. People recognize the possibility, even likelihood, of wet, sloppy snow in copious quantities. The rest of the natural world seems perfectly happy to be faked out.
Birds have been driven both to distraction and to frenetic activity. This morning, a downy woodpecker was acting, well, cuckoo in our back yard. It rushed from one location to another, landing and taking off, over and over, like a tiny plane practicing touch-and-goes. While out walking the dog today, I could almost have caught a male robin in my hands. He was in hot pursuit of a female robin who’d just given him the brush-off, and he only had eyes for her, giving us hardly any clearance at all. A couple days ago, a sparrow—presumably on a similar mission—decided the direct route to its goal was through my head. I had to duck to get out of the way. I turned to watch it, in case I was its goal and it planned to have another go at me. But dog and I were, apparently, irrelevant to its urgent birdie business.
Late-winter flowers are blooming around the neighborhood–snowdrops, crocus, and winter aconite—and bulb flowers are sending up shoots. I planted a mix of bulbs in our front garden last fall and purposely didn’t label anything. Each flower will be not just a pleasure but a surprise. The anticipation is part of the fun.
One of my sweet sisters-in-law sent us an amaryllis bulb for Christmas last year. We put it in a window upstairs, and in the fullness of time, it delivered itself of four big, showy blooms. They’ve withered now, and I’d already looked up how to store the bulb, when the plant announced that storage would be premature. The amaryllis is hard at work putting up a second stalk with another fat pod-shaped flower bud. Perhaps it plans to bloom again. A remarkable gift.
With the break in the weather, my husband was able to secure our Christmas-present-to-ourselves anemometer on the deck railing. This is a temporary arrangement, he tells me, as the deck is in the wind shadow of the house. Come summer, he wants to mount the device on a tall pole out in the yard, which should yield more accurate readings. Whether or not the readings are accurate now, watching the anemometer turn is entertaining.
The big revelation to me has been the wind-direction indicator. It is rarely still. The readout doesn’t report every swing of the vane, but can still go from south-southwest to east in the blink of an eye. I understand that this is, in part, due to the wind shadow effect. But only in part, and it explains so much. I’ve certainly experienced sudden wind shifts when out sailing, but sometimes they’ve seemed improbably wild. Surely, I’ve thought to myself, I must be imagining some of this, no matter what the tell tales say. Au contraire, the anemometer, says, radical wind shifts are real. It’s nice to have an anemometer that speaks French.
A few weeks ago, I joined an on-line neighborhood newsletter. Today, it had posts about a house fire on a street not far from here. Immediately, folks began organizing help for the displaced family. And when a neighbor requested a Chihuahua-sized dog collar–she was watching the family’s dog and wanted to take it for a walk—another neighbor offered to drop one off forthwith.
Also today, there was a series of posts about a lost dog. A woman announced she had found a dog and corralled it in her fenced back yard. She included her address and a photograph of the dog. Four posts later, the dog was back home. He had escaped when the wind blew his owners’ back gate open. Oui, our anemometer says, such things can happen.
Tomorrow, thanks to the newsletter, some of our stuff is going to a new home. Like many other folks during the pandemic, I’ve been prowling the house in search of items we no longer use. Several board games fell into this category, and I had them in bags, ready for drop-off at the Thrift Shop. But a posting on the newsletter mentioned an interest in board games, so I won’t even need to carry our offerings to the car. I’ll just put them on the porch, and the young lady who posted will come collect them. This newsletter is a great thing, one of many happening this warm week in March.
5 March 2021