April showerings

With just four days left in the month, it’s about time for the April showers to finally put in an appearance on Roundtop Mtn. Of course the “May flowers” have mostly already bloomed anyway. This weekend on the mountain saw that misty kind of rain that goes on for days and eventually soaks everything. It’s the good kind of rain for plants and the water table alike.

Even for a human like me, who welcomes this rain, the effect of it is a bit less good. The outwear gets soaked quickly and doesn’t dry out before I need to go outside again. The dogs happily track mud into the cabin and create ever more work for me. But after nearly a full month with no rain, I’m not really complaining, just observing.

Around the cabin, the early leaves and now happily expanding leafy canopy almost surely mean I will see fewer warblers than is typical and that is always fewer than I’d like. With the canopy much thicker than usual for this time of the year, whatever warblers that don’t overfly my cabin on their flight north will likely be impossible to see. Warblers seem to be fewer in number every year. The years of “warbler waves” that brought hundreds of them in one group are long past. This year I won’t even be able to gauge the extent of the decline as I won’t be able to see the ones that do arrive and fly past.

The leafy canopy is welcome in other ways, though. It is nearly always quiet around the cabin, but the leaves of the summer forest make my surroundings even quieter, muffling all but the loudest sounds. I never quite get over the shock of noise when I leave the mountain. Even in nearby rural areas, sounds of cars passing on the two-lane roads seem ever-present to me. Here at the cabin, human sounds are rare and those distant. I like it this way.