Speaking of changing, what a month! For that matter, what a couple of months this has been. Crazy weather.
The Sunny Gallery
Red-bellied woodpecker and his friend, the Tufted Titmouse
It has been raining relentlessly forever, it seems. We get a couple of nice days … then a week of gray weather and pouring rain. No worries about dry rivers this year!
Red-bellied woodpecker and his friend, the Tufted TitmouseBright Goldfinch
Not that crazy isn’t an inherent part of our New England weather. Our weather is unpredictable, especially as winter tries to turn into spring — and usually fails, until May when suddenly, it’s summer.
An Easter bouquet
It was lovely here Monday and Tuesday. Blue skies, warm weather and the song of the Carolina Wren can be heard all around the property. Today the gray weather showed up again, but it’s not supposed actually rain again until Friday and Saturday. But no sunshine, either.
Tomorrow, there will be rain and wind — but after that, I’m hoping to clean up the garden before the rest of the flowers open. It’s hard to rake when the daylilies are blooming. And half the rhododendrons are dead and need cutting back.
Not only did it start out sunny, but it stayed sunny. All day today. It was warm without being hot and the flowers began to bloom. There was almost no humidity.
The birds were singing. The winds were warm and a bit blowy.
Tomorrow it’s supposed to be even nicer. Sunny and warm, without the wind. It should be the most prime of prime days for all of spring and if I can find a little time between errands, it could be the best day to take springlike pictures.
A day for Goldfinch
And all I have to do, is get to the doctor to pick up a script, have the oil in the car changed (I don’t know where the time has gone!), go grocery shopping, put the new mailbox up, and go into starvation mode for the tests they are (finally) running on Thursday. These should prove, once and for all, whether or not I have brains in my head. Or maybe it’s just some old hard drive that got stuck there.
Oh and I really should back up the month of March before it becomes May.
House Finch and Cowbird
Thursday should hopefully be the last day I am spending at the hospital unless they find something I don’t want them to find. It’s why I hate testing. It’s not merely the time, inconvenience and the bill that always shows up eventually. It’s that I don’t want them to discover something unfortunate. So if all goes well, I should be able to stop visiting specialists and maybe save enough to get a pair of eyeglasses.
And pay the man who is going to fix the chimney. And buy a storm door for the house before winter shows up again.
The Mourning Dove has returned
We were at the doctor today, too — for Garry. Meanwhile, I’m trying to find a good injector of cortisone to see if I can get my hips and back to hurt less. It’s getting hard to get around. In 10 years, I’ll be unable to move at all and that is not a pleasant thought so I have to see if I can get arthritis to at least, slow down.
Another pretty red House Finch
So again, if I’m missing, it’s not lack of love. It’s just that the days are not long enough. It’s half past midnight and I’m writing tomorrow morning’s post because I know I won’t be able to do it at the usual time. These are the days when I begin to wonder if maybe there’s another way to deal with this.
Hundreds of unread emails and posts and news and photos to process … and I already know I’m not going to be able to do it.
Not what I had in mind, but at least, for two days, the sun is shining and look! The birds stayed and let me take their pictures!
The daffodils began to bloom today. I’m sure they all be wide open tomorrow! Spring sunshine in the garden. I’m really celebrating because it didn’t rain today and it isn’t supposed to rain tomorrow, either.
Yay spring!
Open and beautifulEven more daffodilsAnd just one more
The season didn’t change much here, though I suppose it got warmer overall. Mostly, though, the birds changed. I spent the month hibernating. This is the time of year when I really begin to hate our weather.
We are (usually) past major amounts of snow, though some of the heaviest snow we’ve ever seen has shown up in March and April. In this area in 1997, 36 inches of snow fell on April 1st and almost 25 in Boston.
Garry’s Snow Pictures
Our long, long driveway after the plowing …
March snowstorm, by the woods …
Pointed pickets in snow
Photo Garry Armstrong
Photo Garry Armstrong – There really IS a road there, honest
Photo Garry Armstrong
Photo Garry Armstrong
Photo Garry Armstrong
Our house in the snow from the street
Dogs on the sofa, gazing on snow
There is a storm on the way, but I am expecting mostly rain. I could be wrong, but I’m counting on being right.
Birds in March
A small and rather petite Blue Jay
Squabbling Juncos
Nuthatch on feeder
Red and yellow finches
The odd couple …
Carolina Wren
Brightest Goldfinch
Goldfinch and a Nuthatch
Red and yellow finches
A yellow finch in flight and a waiting red finch
Hairy Woodpecker dines alone
Red-Bellied Woodpecker at feeding time
We got the heaviest snow of the winter at the beginning of the month and Garry took the pictures. It took about a week to melt and then it got warm, rained, was windy, got cold. Then a day or two of warm.
Garry’s Valley In March
Just a week after the snow … buds on the trees by the road
Photo: Garry Armstrong – More fencing around the boat store
Wooden bridge over the Mumford River, downtown Uxbridge
Photo: Garry Armstrong – at the place where they sell boats (it isn’t a marina … no water in sight!)
Photo: Garry Armstrong
Photo: Garry Armstrong – Downtown Uxbridge
Cardinal back in the woods
I’m trying to pay as little attention as I can to the news. I’m not very good at it, but I keep trying. All of the news from everywhere on the globe, but even more from here, is bad. I feel like the entire world has gone wrong. I really want to live through this and see it get better. I do not want this to be the last I see of this world!
Cardinal in the woods
Photo: Garry Armstrong
Photo: Garry Armstrong
We see each other!Scarred and scornful, I stand my ground!One of my birthday bouquets!
And the new bathroom!
Installing plumbing
Installation! The bathtub is already gone.
Looks pretty good!
As much of the room as I could fit into the picture!
Plenty of room for our “stuff.”
The room, well lit
About The Changing Seasons
The Changing Seasons is a monthly challenge where bloggers around the world share what’s been happening in their month.
If you would like to join in, here are the guidelines:
The Changing Seasons Version One (photographic):
Each month, post 5-20 photos in a gallery that you feel represent your month
Don’t use photos from your archive. Only new shots.
Tag your posts with #MonthlyPhotoChallenge and #TheChangingSeasons so that others can find them
The Changing Seasons Version Two (you choose the format):
Each month, post a photo, recipe, painting, drawing, video, whatever that you feel says something about your month
Don’t use archive stuff. Only new material!
Tag your posts with #MonthlyPhotoChallenge and #TheChangingSeasons so others can find them.
The birdies are blooming in breeding colors and there are buds (but no leaves or flowers) on bushes and trees. What is up really?
Bugs are up. Ants are up. Birds are nesting and beginning to breed. The temperature is finally swinging around and while we will get some more cold days and night, we aren’t going to get a long month of deep freeze weather … or at least so we hope.
Back from the south, Carolina Wren
I’m waiting for a flower to appear outside. We have giant amounts of forsythia, but they don’t bloom much because they are at the edge of the woods and there’s very little sunlight there. A lot of our bushes bloom very late and some no longer bloom.
Nuthatch who never gets dizzy upside-down!Our fearless deck squirrelMy personal favorite odd couple …
The winds of winter took down a lot of trees and I’m pretty sure our giant lilac tree has finally been squashed flat. It had taken several hits before, but I think this year, it’s a goner. I would like to be wrong. I guess I’ll know soon enough. At least by the middle of May, if not sooner.
Another odd couple — Carolina Wren and GoldfinchDown the trees stalks the Nuthatch
Our Carolina Wrens are back and the Goldfinch have turned bright yellow and gold. Young squirrels have come up and hanging around for hours, picking up pieces of seeds that have fallen from the feeders.
Bright little birds!Red and yellow, oh my! Better than flowers!
It is not quite springtime in the Valley as it is in other areas, but for this part of the world?
Maybe not flowers, but definitely colorful!
This is spring. Or kind of springlike. More or less springish. We are working on it.
Our mailbox got beat up. Was it whacked by a teenager and a baseball bat or hit by a plow? Since we didn’t see it happen, it’s a guess. What we know it that it got mashed. Not just ours, but our neighbors and other people on the same route. The ground is still pretty hard, making putting in a new post difficult, but the post office refused to deliver mail without a mailbox.
Photo: Garry Armstrong – Buds in March
Yet somehow, the mailbox got repaired. Not replaced, but fixed. Along with our neighbor across the street. Owen didn’t do it. I asked and he said no, he hadn’t repaired it, so either the neighbor did a secret repair … or the plow driver took responsibility and did it … or the post office did it … or some stranger did it. We are still going to need to do a proper repair. It’s not an expensive repair, mind you. $20 for a post and another $22 for a post box.
Voila! Ready for mail for at least another decade or two, depending on snowfall, plow, teenagers and garbage trucks who also have been known to back into mailboxes.
Photo Garry Armstrong
I’m betting on the guy across the street and the next time we see him, we’ll have to ask. We aren’t exactly friends, but we aren’t exactly not friends. We are the kind of “over the hedge” friends you become in New England. He gives us extra tomatoes (he grows beautiful tomatoes) and we are always very happy to get them.
We have watched his children grow from little kids to college graduates. I remember when our children (our grandchild, actually) took the same school buses. Time has flown!
And now another summer is lurking a few months in the future. It’s only March so it’s still cold but it will get warmer. Eventually, it will be spring, then summer. Before we have time to blink, winter will be back.
Photo: Garry Armstrong – March down by the Mumford Dam
It seems to me the summer is when you race like mad to try and get everything done because there is very little time between the end of winter and winter’s return.
Weather is changing. Autumn is shorter. Summer is shorter and winter lasts longer. There is more rain, more ice, less snow. I don’t know what it means because New England is the kind of environment for erratic weather. Now it’s more erratic, but because it has always been strange. it is more strange, but what does it mean?
I’m sure it means something, but I’m not enough of a scientist to be able to tease the threads apart and make the right deductions. I simply know for the past two years, autumn has gone missing and we’ve had more rain and ice, less snow and more wind than I’ve ever seen. Which for New England IS unusual.
Often, through the endless winter, Maggie had been sure her garden would never bloom again. As the frozen ground showed no signs of softening in spring sunshine and clumps of dirty brown snow lay on the earth, she would look at the garden and think: “This year, it can’t bloom. Too cold for too long. Too much ice and snow. And I have not been able to work with it, either.”
The overgrown disorder of the last year’s growth was still thatched across the garden. It had rained so much last year they’d been unable to clear it, so it had stayed there, mulching its way through the winter as they mulched with it.
Despite this and her nearly terminal certainty of imminent doom and total destruction, the garden would suddenly return. Everything bloomed at once. Roses and rhododendrons and daylilies and even the daffodils and columbine.
Flowers suddenly bloomed. In some of the worst years when winter had lain on the ground through most of May, those awful, bitter winters? In those years, the garden would bloom all at once with a frantic and wild passion as if it making up for the lost weeks of normal growth, for the dead months when they had been unable to set a single bud.
One day, she would come downstairs and out the gate and gasp at the amazing colors, how the roses had covered the buses like blankets. That the holly was almost a full story tall and even the miniature lilac bushes and thrown a flower or two.
It gave her hope in a world where the sun rarely shined and she prayed only that the well would not be polluted from something poured into the ground, seeping slowly into that fragile layer of underground water.
Their source of life was down there. In her case more than 450 feet down there, one of the deepest wells in the area. Their water had always been clear and ice-cold after it rose from the underlying rocks.
Was this barrenness a forerunner to one more garden? One more summer when the heat didn’t burn the earth to cinders?
She could only watch and wait. Each year was different. One year, it never stopped raining and after a while, the ground felt like a giant sponge, soft and gooey. Then there would be years of drought, leaving all of them wondering if the underground miracle of water would survive.
It was the very early days of the first week in May. In normal years — sometimes called “the old days” — she’d have already seen her early flowers. The garden would have moved on from crocus to daffodil and would now be full of Columbine and the green shoots of daylilies. The old lilac outback would be about to bloom.
Wild garden
But maybe, one more year, the earth would catch its breath and everything would grow again. Maybe the rivers would fill up and somehow, as if they too were seeds waiting to be born, fish would be there and snapping turtle. The geese and the swans and the herons would fish and flocks of ducks would magically float down with the current.
All she could do was wait and never give up hope. the Earth would come back. After all, it always had.
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