You know, perhaps, that nearly all bears den up for the winter (the exception being bears who live in climates where the winter doesn't stand in their way for getting food -- Mexican black bears, for example). In Wisconsin, there's no easy winter. And bears are not the only ones digging in to go without food or water in the dead of the cold season. Turtles found in this climate also slow down and burrow in wetland locations. They cant breathe underwater, but they have a complicated way of getting air to keep them alive (through their butts). They don't necessarily sleep, but they stay in this inactive state until spring. They have the capacity to stay that way for up to eight months.
This is why Ed and I were surprised to see a turtle sunning herself on a tree limb jutting out of the pond at our favorite county park up the road.
Shouldn't she be burrowed and asleep? Perhaps we should not expect all turtles to be like bears.
Or all partners in life to follow some basic partner protocol of behavior.
Perhaps there will always be the outlier, sunning her (or him)self in December even as the rest are long dug into the muddy wetlands.
I think of Ed oftentimes as that solitary turtle who refuses to acknowledge that December (and all that it implies) is here.
He has his own radar. His own internal compass. It underwent one cosmic (for him) adjustment when I came into his life, but that was it. I can expect that how he is today or tomorrow will not change. Oh, a tweak here or there. But at the core, he is his own turtle and this particular turtle is not going to be a bear, even if all the turtles on the planet are long in their deep sleep mode, much as can be said of the bears.
In the afternoon, I pick up Snowdrop at school and we do what we did three weeks ago: I take her home...
(Hi, Sandpiper!)
... and her dad drives her to Pope Elementary, where kids are getting their second shot of the Covid vaccine. I follow and wait for her to come out.
Afterwards, happy and excited, she comes back with me to the farmhouse (where she immediately points out all the new ornaments on the tree).
In the evening, I take her back home
(As always, I see her brothers in and around pick up/drop off times at their house.)
And back at the farmhouse, I cook up a sweet potato, corn and jalapeno bisque. Perhaps you saw the recipe in the Washington Post. We had about four pounds of sweet potatoes left over from our CSA veggie box and it was a good use of them. And as Ed said -- it was very filling. And spicy. And I probably wont go out of my way to make it again because there are too many fantastic soups out there to cook up on a cold winter night, so why waste time on one that's fine but not great?
Now, back to a little wrapping and a lot of admiring of the Christmas tree!
