Not quite yet

Spring is still stuck in neutral for the next day or so. A warm up, enough to move the season along and push new growth out of the ground, is but a few days away. But that promise, that hint of warmer weather wasn’t enough to keep from setting a record low last night. So for the moment, spring remains a promise and not a reality. I am anxious for something different to look at.

Early spring is a good time to do some outside cleanup around the cabin. It’s not yet too hot, and the lack of greenery and underbrush makes the clean-up easier. I have a lot of downed limbs, in addition to the usual array of pots broken by winter’s freeze and thaw cycle or plastic flower pots that were broken when they were covered by snow and I stepped on them. Last night I also discovered that an old wooden deck table that came with the cabin finally lost a leg and now sits at an angle at the edge of the property. So there is work to be done, though I don’t seem to have much ambition to get to it. Perhaps there will be time this weekend, when it is sunny and the temperature rises a few more degrees each day. Work is easy to ignore when daylight lasts longer, and a walk after work in the woods is far more fun.

The woods are at one of their less interesting points in the year, too, but walking in daylight still feels like a novelty to me, even if the scenery is less than stellar. Last evening I heard one of the local wild turkeys gobbling away just at dusk, perhaps calling his harem to roost, perhaps searching for hens to create a harem. It is a wild and crazy sound, not as evocative as a loon’s call or a red-tailed hawk’s scream but not far from that either. It was the first one I’d heard since winter broke and marks yet another sign of the spring that hasn’t quite arrived yet.