A Marvelously Quaint Spring

Instead of an even year, this is showing many characteristics of an odd one, right here in Dixon, let alone the rest of the world. Henry’s in short sleeves and a Hawaiian-style straw hat, without the orchids, alas, while I’m wrapped in wool and leather. Hummingbirds arrive ten days ahead of my schedule and stay. No scouting this year. Within seventy-two hours, five or six of the enslaving mites demand June’s ration of sugar water. I miss two beloveds’ birthdays and allow the cheat grass to mature because I’m lost in April.

What’s with this weather? Every day for the past week I dutifully hustled Loretta’s tomato queens to the portal for “hardening off”. Each day they  immediately languished into whining and shivering princesses. ‘It’s too cold. This wind is mussing my leaves. Ooh ooh, heat stroke!’ Yeah yeah yeah. In they come to clutter the window sill again. Then this morning blooms with true May loveliness and I’m cautiously lured outside by the siren call of the newly opened survivors. Yikes! Look at those mature forbs and grasses I need to stuff into black plastic. 

Nestled among the weeds, lies the beauty. Flax loved this past winter and gaily enhance the splendid blue floor show arrayed for my viewing pleasure, high dancers to the sedately huddled violets and proselytizing phlox. If I can teach my Manx kitty, Lince Felice, to hunt squirrel as well as she does gopher, I’ll have strawberries soon. I happily feed the two crows who help her manage pigeons.

A bank of glorious purple and white iris valiantly parade their wind-bruised petals to the three bird species that defy my brain’s classification system. Is it black-headed or black-hooded grosbeak and is that a female or a juvenile or a spotted towhee or a Bullock’s oriole or some delicate exotic blown off course by the conflagration in the Gulf? I sure do love those hot splashes of orange, whichever they may be. And my heart gladdens when I spy those tiny lazuli boys jumping into the fray for millet. 

Did you catch a glimpse of the ruby-crowned kinglet on the bird count trek this year? How about this splendiferous magpie? Our here-and-there bird braniac seeks information on a cause of this coloration and I gasp at the wondrous serendipity of a hot pink magpie visitor gracing my yard, I who burst with  happiness for the marvels of pink? I am so very lucky. 

Making Paper

Spring’s symphony lures me outside thirty times a day; sharp winds chilled by snow falling north of us chase me back inside. With the door open until the radiant heat kicks on, I witness preposterous pre-Beltane hummingbird operas. Breathy whuff whuff whuffs alert me that ravens eyeball the spilled seed from a chickadee/finch feeders and I dash to glimpse those ebon beauties. Busybody magpies audaciously trumpet imagined rudeness, repeatedly. I sit to tear Scott’s luxurious paper strips into much smaller scraps and watch spring arrive in its coltish exuberance.  

As I rearrange the shape of cotton fiber from one form of paper into the foundation of another, a call and response song swirls between my corseted, bundled-up winter self and my gamboling fritillary spring self. This whole-body unbinding invigorates me. How happy I am to check which plants need to be moved, where the weeds are already out-of-control, which birds now nest in the mulberry, how many gophers took up resident. The pile of paper awaiting tearing shrinks and the joyous duties outside increase. I catch a moment of nuthatch dance; then there’s the extravagant spilled-paint canvas of cheat grass green. My senses actually awaken. I hear, see, think, feel, and smell more vividly.

I’ve already worn my yellow mustache from dandelion tonics, seared my forehead, strained a cranky spine, walked into forgotten prickly pear, and lamented one more year with only one or two potential apricots. Loretta’s tomato giantesses lustily solicit me to dally with them outside, NOW! Cats relearn push/pull door-operating techniques and the consequences of perching on the convenient but verboten bird-catching rock. Although I’ve never seen a seed pod, the violets that Yoga Mark gave me way back when dispersed and now their tiny, lovely faces lure me low all over my yard. My body limbers in preparation for summer’s relentless demands.

It’s all intertwined. I ease into the work of summer by preparing to make paper which will appear as art about the same time I lug in my last harvest. What a treasure a gift a remarkable happenstance for me to witness one more spring in this body, in this house, in this community.