the incredible signs of spring

Me, I always looked for flowers. In March -- tiny green shoots first, then buds, then the full face of a crocus or snowdrop.

Too, Spring arrives with daylight savings time, though in recent years this has been complicated, as I have been going through two separate daylight savings jumps - one here, and one a few weeks later in Europe (to be repeated this year).

And now I have another marker -- a beautiful one at that!

But first, there is breakfast. With daffodils. (Grocery stores begin carrying them by the bucket load a good month before they open up their bright faces outside.)







And even earlier, there is farmhouse cleaning: the upstairs today, the downstairs tomorrow. And writing! Don't forget about writing!

Alright. I'm happy to have a clean home (or at least a clean bedroom and bathroom) and I am very happy to finish the editing job on the next one of the (too many) chapters of my Great Writing Project. But it's sunny outside and we're a bunch of degrees above freezing. Many on the east coast would be green with envy. Ed and I need to spend some time outdoors.

We do the easy walk -- on the trails of the newly discovered park segment just up the road. Through a dormant prairie...






... Onto a slip of land jutting out into Lake Waubesa...






(where you will still find a few bold fisher people doing their thing...)






An hour later, we are driving home and this is when spring really hits me in the face full blast. I mean, I knew they was coming, I heard them, I sensed their presence, but seeing is believing, no?
















The sandhill cranes fly away from our state for the three months of winter: they leave in December and come back in March. They are back now.










And that makes me so happy!

Marching forward

We're up early. This is unusual. Typically, we try very hard to get up because we want to, not because we have to. And we deeply dislike a morning rush. For Ed, this is the way he has always been. For me -- it's the relief I feel after years of morning frenzy -- to get the kids up and out, to get my lectures written and delivered, etc etc. But today is the exception: Ed has early work commitments and I have a stack, a pitiful stack of chores to run through before my afternoon pick up of Snowdrop.

So, early breakfast...






... followed by cheeper care (they're back to hovering by the farmhouse all the time!)...





...and off we go!

I would like to believe that I accomplished a lot today, but apart from weekly grocery shopping (which always makes me feel great, in the same way that I'm sure it made my grandma feel great to stock her larder so that no one would ever go hungry), I merely relived the tedium of picking up a clean slate laptop (new operating system, all programs and data erased... thanks, guys) and worked through reconfiguring all that had to be reconfigured.

For the first time ever, I was late (by only four minutes, but still...) picking up Snowdrop. (Never try to update an operating system on the run.)

On the upside, I am, for the time being, done with all this silly stuff. I can go back to important tasks, like picking up fallen logs and spreading wood chips on a flower bed expansion.



When I pick up the little girl, the heretofore cloudy skies clear. It is an omen. We must go to the playground!






Happy girl, happy moments of outdoor play.






As we walk from car to farmhouse, I hear the unmistakable call of the sandhill. Have they returned??






This calls for a celebratory hug and kiss. The cheepers partake.






Once inside, wreath comes on, heart opens up, stories flow.






We partake. She so wants us as props. Here we are, waiting at the hospital. It's been a day of accidents. We must wait our turn.






Clever Ed thinks he might slip out for a while if he claims duty calls. But no! She assures him that there are no bathrooms in this hospital.






I mean, he may be clever, but she is one step ahead of him.






And now it is evening. Snowdrop is long gone. Ed and I ate take out sushi. My feet are up, the new computer sits waiting. Such a relief to be looking ahead to the peculiarities of March! At times sunny, at times cold and wet, but I know this much: in a few days, we can start looking for the emergent tips of crocus flowers. 

welcome, March

March, we're ready for you. You bring a lot of good into our everyday. You usher in my favorite season. You're not exactly predictable, but the trend is healthy.We spend more days outside, we're likely to spot the first spring flowers in your embrace.

Today, however, I barely noticed your presence. I spent my morning doing my taxes.

Now, I am not a complicated tax situation. I have a pension and a modest IRA. I move things around a little when I spend too much on my grandkids. Otherwise -- yawn.

Well, maybe "yawn" for you, but it takes several schedules and many sheets of paper to put all that down in a way that's acceptable to the tax authorities. Moreover, for many years I took the easy path and worked with Turbo Tax (a tax filing program that charges and arm and a leg, but does fill out your forms, with a lot of feel good prompts and delightfully cartoonish questions throughout). Ed convinced me last year that I am wasting my money. He's right, of course. Good bye Turbo Tax. It's back to just filling out the darn forms. With a lot of sympathetic if not quite cartoonish comments and prompts and useful hints from Ed.

All that happens after breakfast, of course.





(Yes, at the kitchen table today!)

And there you have my first half day. I could, I suppose, admit that I did switch from tax work to medical insurance for a brief while, as I had to wait forever and then speak with an SSI rep about the threatening letter I just received about an absence of proper documentation for my Medicare application, but why bother. Let's just say I spent the better part of my day either filling out forms or trying to understand what forms still needed to be filled. Hello, March!


In the afternoon, I am with Snowdrop.

How might I describe her day... Hmmm....

Well, she is a bit tired. Up early, no nap. I propose a proper rest time. In her bed. She is agreeable. We go upstairs. She asks me to stay in her room. Normally I would never do this, but this time I stretch out on the adult bed in her little room. Not bad, I'm thinking. I could use a little rest myself.

Twenty-four seconds later she sits up with a smile: I'm rested!

There's much good that can be said about our time together, but perhaps you find that repetitive, so instead I'll point out that we went through many hair changes today. (Ed later tells me -- she seemed bossier today, don't you think? I smile indulgently: no my dear, she simply seemed more in control of her own wonderful three year old world.)

There was the pony tail. (Grandma, can I wear your hair ribbon? Not that one. This one. Well, maybe I want that one. Not this one.)






Happy girl...






She then dresses up to play the adult. She slips on her necklace, bracelet, puts on her flower wreath. It's become a routine. I know what follows: a game of shenanigans with her babies. There's a lot of laughter, bossiness, scripted story lines.






But each time, there is a novel twist. Today she is focused on all my Polish wooden statues and carvings.






How they relate to her tale of motherhood woes is unimportant. I just so enjoy her telling of this tall tale. I love that she is so animated, so full of expression. I love the intricacy of the plot.






And most of all, I love that the whole play makes her so happy.






But eventually she will have had enough. She carries over her smile to a drawing session (oh yes, the hair trimmings are removed now)...






And finally, she finds her hair clips and insists I put them in just so for her last minutes of character play.






So, happy March to you! In Wisconsin, the sun set at 5:46 today. That's a whole hour and twenty-four minutes later than in December.

And it's a pretty sunset at that!

to improve

At breakfast this morning Ed tells me that one big roadblock to innovation and change is feeling satisfied with what you already have. Why push for improvement, why make the effort when you're not craving for something better?






We talk about this in the context of farmette land. In hauling brush and timber to the wood pile, I had paused to catch my breath and I was struck by how beautiful the land looks there, beyond the great willow tree. The strip of land is now covered by a terrible tangle of weeds. But if we mowed it down, we could create a splendid undulating prairie, with perhaps a path and a space for a young child to frolic.

I had tried to mow that area just before my younger girl's farmette wedding some four years ago. But there were boulders and I damaged blades on the tractor mower and in the end I just gave up. Now I'm half thinking that I should give it another go.

Ed loves most of my work on the farmette land. Oh, he gripes when I take a violent slash to raspberry patches or insist that trees need to come down because they block the sun and kill off most anything that needs its fortifying rays, but these are gentle gripes that don't mean much. Still, in recent times, he has been resistant to big scale improvements. I'm happy with what's here -- he'll say again and again.

But today, perhaps sensing my total love for this beautiful patch of land, or maybe feeling us to be getting older -- how many years more can we haul tree stumps and spread wood chips over new flower beds? -- he surprises me by asking -- so, you really want that other huge tree to come down?

He's referring to a box elder that leans from silo to flower bed. I don't think it's likely to come crashing down just yet (though box elders are forever uprooting and toppling), but still, taking it out will create a feeling of openness by the Great Big Flower bed. I've been thinking for a long time that the invasive box elders have been crowding us out of our own little piece of heaven here.

And so this is how we spend a good chunk of the day today: sawing, snipping and hauling.






I feel that since I wanted this project, I should do the grunt work. And so he saws, I haul. And the cheepers watch from a distance.





I, of course, love the openness that we have now created. Ed is predictably ambivalent. After all, another tree came down.
We're beginning to look like the suburbs. 

Oh, are we ever far from looking like the suburbs!






In the afternoon, I pick up Snowdrop.
Is she ever excited!






Yes, that's right. Dance away, little girl!






If it's Wednesday, it must be ballet class day!






As I watch her, I think how tiny she is. And how ernest and happy to be joining in this lovely few minutes of story and dance.






(Today's story is Goldilocks and the Three Bears, though honestly, last week's costume and dance moves weren't all that different from this week's...)






I think about this day -- it's been so full, in so many good ways. I should be tired. I've been carrying heavy limbs and heavy little girls. (Snowdrop loves wrapping herself around me in a good old fashioned upright carry. She tells me today -- Grandma, I am the kind of girl who loves to be carried!) But I'm not tired. There is something so energizing in clearing land and hoisting your granddaughter onto your hip.

And of course, in a few weeks, we have spring.

These are indeed the good months.

machines and puffs

Sun's out! We have some spring cleaning to do!

It's mildly funny that on this beautiful day, a day that portends the season just ahead of us, we dive into a clearing and cleaning by bringing out the machines.

But first -- breakfast.






As I already mentioned - Ed felled a tree yesterday and now comes the task of cutting it into manageable pieces. Branches will be hoisted to the top of the wood pile (which is a mountain, so high that I cannot even see what's on the other side), logs will be stacked. He has his saw to help with the big logs. The work is both dangerous and hard and I typically like to not watch because when I witness a slip or a tumble or an inadvertent crash, I have images of severed limbs and blood mixing with the melted snow.





In the meantime, our robotic vacuum cleaner dusts the house and that means, of course, that I have to dust as well. To my knowledge the little machine does not climb walls or reach tabletops.

I then join Ed outside to do my annual (or perhaps biannual) coax: so long as you have the chain saw, might you cut down this one branch (or two, or a hundred) that's in the way of other growth?

We walk the farmette land and he reluctantly takes down a limb or even an invasive tree that has taken hold in very inappropriate spaces. He is mostly agreeable if I use the right words and convince him that just letting things be is bad for the planet.

(The cheepers hate the sound of the saw. They watch from a distance.)





If the sawing of timber is tough, the hauling of felled limbs and logs is worse.  I alternate between thinking : I'm sixty- four, I can't believe I'm hauling heavy logs! Yuk! And, in my finer moments: hey, I'm sixty-four and I'm hauling heavy logs! I'm so relieved that I can still do this!


In the afternoon there is this wonderful confluence of two things: the temperature climbs to 55F (13C) and I have an afternoon with Snowdrop. I suppose the only low point is a call from Apple:
Say, what did you think was wrong with your computer? Because we have no problem starting it up.

Great. I couldn't start it. Ed couldn't start it. Apple clerk on Sunday couldn't start it. Apple clerk on Monday couldn't start it. And now, APple repair person plugs it in and it loads in a snap.

So what now?
Oh, we'll probably erase everything, install new operating system...
Erase everything?
Yes and maybe that will solve the problem.
And if not, then I will have to go through the same thing again. Grrr.

Snowdrop is a welcome distraction.

We go to the park. She tells stories. And runs freely in the warming air. Oh, I know it's still the end of February, but today's taste of things to come is sublime!





















At the farmhouse, the stories continue...






And eventually, she wants to go outside again. Who can blame her??






Off she goes with Ed to put away the cheepers. On the return, she is in full story mode.






We go to the front yard. The evening beckons!






I find milkweed puffs, she blows them into the sunset.





A day that begins with machines and ends with milkweed puffs. And the sun was warm and the skies were bluejay blue. Just heavenly!