Well, it's been a while.  Spring has arrived, kind of.  The juncos are gone, my way of telling if it's spring, but the forsythia is not yet out all the way.  Spring is about 2-4 weeks late.  We went to the Cape for Laura's 50th birthday, and we were surprised by snow.  Yes, it snowed, enough for me to make a snowball to ham it up for a photo.  Even with less than ideal weather, Wellfleet is beautiful.  We visited every ocean beach, lots of damage and erosion to the dunes from the bad winter.

The highlight for Laura was our stop at Catherine's chocolates in Great Barrington for Easter candies.  The smell alone is worth the trip. 

Other thoughts:  (my mind is spinning)  Shredded wheat.  Sabra and I were reminiscing about shredded what, we didn't even think they sold it anymore.  But then there it was - and I happily threw it into the grocery cart.  Yesterday I opened it for breakfast -  individually wrapped two large pieces of wheat.  Two were just right - filling the bowl, I poured milk over the two cakes, and watched it quickly disappear.  More milk, and then a taste - not quite the way I remembered it, more like the animal food they used to sell you at the Catskill Game Farm.  Tivoli Recreation would make a trip there every summer and I would be a chaperon.  There was always one kid that would taste the animal food, sometimes eating the whole thing.  Anyway, that's what came to mind when I took my first taste.  Adding more milk, (maybe it's the milk that used to taste better), I finished the two cakes, realizing how full I felt.  You could go a whole day on shredded wheat.  Then I began to sing a song from Girl Scouts, a song I had not thought of for sixty years at least.  "Grandma chews them in her sleep, she thinks she's chewing shredded wheat" - a song about Grandpa's whiskers.  Today I took Sabra a packet of shredded wheat - let's hear what she thinks of it.  

All winter we have had one lone turkey come to the bird feeders everyday.  I called him Hopalong, because he had a hurt foot, missing toe, and he hopped .  It was amazing to me that he survived not only a frigid winter, but lots of snow, and all by himself.  Was he a loner by choice or did the rest of the turkeys avoid him because of his hop?  At our Cabin Fever party, my neighbors saw Hopalong in the front yard and remarked "there's George - Lonesome George", their name for the bird.  Anyway, last Friday when I came home from School, Hopalong had a visitor, a big tom turkey that kept strutting around him, looking at his reflection in my living room window, and even attacking the porch window.  He must have thought it was another amorous male turkey.

So it turns out that maybe Hopalong, or George is really Georgie Girl.  Today another tom turkey, not quite mature was following her around.  It takes four weeks for the eggs to develop so if George or Georgie Girl starts bringing a family to the feeder, that mystery will be solved.

Another sign of Spring, the Carolina wren is building a nest in our grill again.  She did this two years ago, and is back in the same spot.  She goes into the grill through the hole in the bottom where there used to be a grease can to catch the falling grease.  The grill hasn't worked for years, so it's no problem.  We just don't know how to get rid of a big broken grill, so it stands guard near the propane tank in the back yard.

I've gotten past the "no burning" ordinance in our village.  I picked up lots of broken branches and sticks - all signs of a bad winter and the cicada invasion of last summer.  Anyway, I make a big pile of burning material, start my little Weber grill up, and burn in pieces all the yard refuge. " Just  having a little camp fire, no sir, I am not burning brush, " I imagine my response to the fire truck in the front of the house.  Spring and burning wood is in the air.

And today, I hung up clothes outside for the first time.  The big pile of snow under the clothes line has finally melted.  It felt wonderful to hang those clothes, and to smell them as I took then down, completely dried in the wind today.  Spring - good to finally have you.

My brother Bob and sisters Diane and Barbara gave me an HD TV for Christmas and this evolved into getting a new box from cable, adding more channels than ever and now for three months a free movie channel.  On it I finally got to see The Hunger Game and I was not disappointed - they did a really good job of bringing the story to the screen. 

I've always loved movies.  When I was a kid, our school was condemned, so we only had to go on half days in fifth grade.  Mornings were the best because then you got to go to the movies EVERY afternoon.  It cost only a dime, and so it was not unusual to see a movie more than one time.  Barbara and Jack were dating then, and in the 50's, the movies was the place to go on a date.  One night they came home, laughing their heads off at a cowboy, girl wants boy movie, called "Many Rivers to Cross".  It was apparently on a cheap budget, although it did have two good stars, Robert Taylor and Eleanor Parker.  She was a terrible tomboy, but flipped over Bushrod Gentry, and would say his name, really slow, like a purr, Buusshhrod.  There were only three Indians in the movie, and Jack pointed out that the same three Indian were killed over and over. Another good and memorable thing about this movie is the song, "the higher up the berry tree, the sweeter grows the berries, the more you hug and kiss a girl, the more she wants to marry" (I can remember the words from the 50's better than what you call those buns that you eat at Lent that have a cross on them.)  This was one of those movies I probably saw three or four times.  Anyway, my whole class would sometimes show up at the matinee.  I remember John V bringing binoculars to the theater when it was a Jane Russell movie, wanting a close up of her bosom.

Having so many channels can be a problem though.  I started to watch Buried Alive about hoarders and if you sit through one or two of them, I dare you not to jump up and start to clean our a closet or a drawer.  Well, the new TV is a real God send in this longer than long winter and not so great so far Spring.  But Happy Spring Cleaning cake sniffers (cake sniffers from Lemony Snicket.)

 

Happy spring, although it doesn't look or feel like it.  I have seen red winged blackbirds (but not today), a dead worm on the road, and one chipmunk on a pile of snow high enough that he was looking into the kitchen window.  No sign or sounds of the geese going north, a usual part of March or green mist in the woods, as the blooms start to appear.   So where is Spring?

Saint Patrick's Day, actually the Sunday before, we met at the grave, not to fly kites, or blow bubbles, or to hear When the Saints Come Marching In by Solomon on the trumpet, it was too cold for any thing like that.  So, we kind of stood around, Laura had a bouquet of sunflowers in a jar filled with snow, and I put down too daffodil plants, that if they could talk, would have said, "Are you nuts leaving us here?  It's not even 30 degrees, with a cold north wind."  So we left and came back to my house.  The boys did play croquet in the snow, which was interesting.  The croquet markers have little happy faces that are still stuck in the snow.  Then there was a loud bang on the house and we saw what they were doing - using the clothesline like a sling shot to shoot the mallets. I had to laugh thinking that that would have made Maria laugh.

School starts for me tomorrow at Bard, another sign of Spring.  I am taking three of Shakespeare's  
plays and a class on religion. We have seven sessions, so by the time I'm done with Shakespeare, it should really be spring.  Let's hope so.

One thing this rotten winter has given me back is the desire to read again.  For weeks about the only reading I could do was the Kingston paper and the weekend New York Times - the Times took me all week.  Anyway, the other day I picked up a book because of a review I had read in NY Times on it.  The review was on a book of short stories and referenced an earlier edition of short stories Birds of America and I thought I have that book somewhere.  I remembered taking it to Cape Cod with a whole pile of books that I just never got to.  Anyway, I found it and am enjoying the stories and her writing.  I just finished one about a woman taking a trip to Ireland with her mother to kiss the Blarney Stone - something Chrissy and I did 30 years ago.  What a risky thing to do, climb spooky, curving stones stairs up to the top of the castle, all opened, no roof, then lean backwards, clinging to two iron rods and kissing a stone, after hundreds of others before us.  The local boys told Chrissy  and me "don't worry, we clean it off every night for the tourists" and we knew they didn't use water.

I stopped reading at night quite a while ago, and as I have told you Timmy and I listen to audio books  at night.  Something about being read to is very relaxing and takes one back to childhood memories of snuggling close to Bucky while she read to me about Curious George.  We are currently listening to Lemony Snicket's stories  of the Baudelaire orphans.  Before this we had listened to the Hunger Games and the last one gave me bad dreams.  So we went back to something more innocent and although the orphans go from bad to worse, it makes me laugh out loud sometimes.  The Wide Window had Aunt Josephine in it, and she was afraid of everything.  Don't touch the door knob, it might shatter and cut you, Don't stand near the refrigerator, it might fall over and crush you.  Bucky was like this too, nothing was safe, everything had a hidden danger, so I would nod in agreement, giggle, and take another sip of fundador. 

So that's the way the days have been passing, back with my nose in a book, and the sorrowful, wretched life of the orphans to put me asleep.

Bucky called February "death Month", but I am thinking of a lot of bad words to put in front of February besides death.  The other day the weather man said that 20 degrees is the "new 40 degrees" - this because our thermometer goes from below zero to ten, or in the teens, never above the beautiful 32 degree mark.  And more snow coming tomorrow.

Not that snowy Februarys are new to me.  In 1969 when Paul was in the hospital with a broken leg, it snowed so much our road was closed off.  They had to bring in a back loader and dig it out, little by little.  And then there was the year it snowed so much, I went nuts and put up a sign on the porch window, next to the Valentine decoration, saying "We need more snow".  My neighbor Mary Alice still talks about that.  Or the February it snowed so much I booked a four day cruise for myself and girls.  We had a great time, got back to Miami and were told that it had snowed for four straight days in New York and all the airports were closed.  The airport finally opened, but as we landed in Stewart it was lit up with plows clearing the runway.  Maria mistook this for ambulances and yelled "we're gonna crash", but we made it home all right.

Snow rage is the new term - people yelling at the plows as they go by and push snow into their newly shoveled driveway.  One man actually attacked the plow with his shovel.  Another brought out a rifle and ordered the plow to go away.  I'm not that bad, not yet, anyway.

I remember hearing of an incident in Texas where a wife killed her husband by throwing a watermelon out of the window onto his head.  She was cleared of any punishment because the weather had been over 100 degrees for several weeks, and she used that as her justification.  "I couldn't take the weather or him any longer."  Well, I think days and days of near zero weather can do the same thing.

Timmy is a picky eater.  I don't mean he's hard to please, I mean he picks out the best things in the dinner so that the leftovers are always missing some essential item.  For example:  meatball soup without any meatballs, kielbasa and sauerkraut with no kielbasa.  The other day I made eggplant appetizer with eggplant, celery, onions, tomatoes and best of all - chopped up black olives.  The black olives are my favorite part of the dish.  Sure enough, the leftovers looked different - no black olives left.

Next Sunday is Super Bowl Sunday, the day when more home violence occurs than any other day of the year. This they blame on a combination of alcohol, heightened feelings about the teams, and the violence seen and approved of on television by millions of people.    I have a feeling, unless it warms up significantly, the hot lines will be full of calls this year.