April flowers

The neighborhood is full of good smells - a seasonal event that one must enjoy before the air grows hot and fetid and laden with city stink. For now, magnolias smell like wine, and there are grape hyacinths, narcissus, mown lawns. Nice to return to this, after having been away.

We spent our first night on the Vermont land. After a day of tromping around in muck boots, cataloging in our minds what is there (two creeks that go underground here and back up again there, hazelnut bushes, coltsfoot and cattails, cold balsam-scented breezes, thrushes singing), we shared French lunch (that's snacks with wine!) with new friends, and later set up our tent. As a storm blew in, we listened to a woodcock doing its breeding display, and the rain and the wind. There is a special kind of insomniac anxiety that goes with spending the night in a tent in a storm, and it's not the kind I'm used to, where you just lie there and fret. This kind of anxiety is more elemental, I think, and I appreciate it, in a way, because the scary weather makes me feel real and energized. While worrying about money and work and stupid shit does not. I love a storm and a tent. I do.

the Each Week, One Beast project: week 17

Snowy owl flies north. I've never seen one, but it sounds like they're more common in Vermont, so maybe I will one day. When we first began searching for a place to move, we considered many places across the country... It took a while before we were willing to entertain a spot farther north, with a colder climate, a lower hardiness zone, and fewer exciting things in the bulb catalogs to plant. Now, with northern Vermont in our future, I'm looking forward to other species - plants and animals both - that thrive only where the freeze goes deeper. So, there will be no Anemone coronaria for me - but perhaps a snowy owl!

the Each Week, One Beast project: week 16

Two little cynical saw-whet owls. I'm totally breaking my own One Beast rule, again. Oh well, you know what they say about rules.

Spring sprang sprung

Spring is warming incrementally here, which I don't mind a bit. I filled up the birdbaths for the first time last week, and since then they've been in constant rotation. If the sun is shining, they are usually both full at once. The robins have turned the more favorite of the two into a mixing vat for their proprietary blend of nest mud (grass, roots, compost and poop? I'm just guessing).

I pretty much never stop at yard sales, but on our way through town yesterday we spied The Watering Can of My Dreams (Matt's words), so we pulled over and did a through-the-passenger-window deal. $3! That experience took exactly the amount of time and money I like to spend when I go shopping. And today whenever my watering can called, I jumped up from my desk and scampered out to the garden to water something. I should take a video so you can see its sweet watering action. It will definitely show up in future photos here, on account of how handsome in the landscape it is. That might not be a well worn phrase - handsome in the landscape - but it is the best way to describe my watering can.

And that's that! Otherwise I've just been madly scribbling away with my pencil. I'm working on a bigger drawing than usual, which I hope turns out, because the last big drawing didn't turn out at all and I didn't even know it until the very end, which made for a dismal discovery. And we're going to Vermont to visit my mom and dad, and camp out on our land, and I can't wait.

the Each Week, One Beast project: week 15

Meadow jumping mouse with wheat. This week's beast, like last week's, is not someone I'm personally familiar with. My little city garden is sadly spare on the rodent side of things... We do have a rat or two, of course, and there is someone small and secretive who tunnels between the house foundation and the hemlock tree... So I had to resort to youtube videos to get to know my subject a bit. Meadow jumping mice are cute, as I suspected, and their long, narrow feet are capable of flipping them airborne, like pancakes, in order to cover some distance.

Desk o' owls...

...with a little spot for me, in the middle.

the Each Week, One Beast project: week 14

Barn owl on a post. More owls in the weeks to come, because I have a bigger owl project in mind... Bigger, badder owls! Not really. Just more owls, of all varieties. And who doesn't love an owl?

Spring

Does anyone else feel headless, or at least senseless, this time of year? Lengthening daylight and building summer plans make me unfocused. So much to do! Sometimes I jump up from my desk to attend to some just-remembered something, and without thinking I put my pencil someplace stupid and completely unlikely, and there it hides for the next 15 minutes while I try to retrace my brain-addled steps. And then finally I find my pencil, and it's like, what am I? One of those woodpeckers that stashes acorns for a time when there won't be any more acorns anymore? Except those woodpeckers probably remember just where they put their acorns, so never mind.