The snow’s streaming horizontally past the window and the spruces are being whipped from side to side. I braved the elements earlier to put out some seed, and now under the pale wintry sun a host of jostling redpolls is working hard at depleting the store.
They disappeared during last week’s warm spell – they prefer what they can glean when the earth is bare – but in a white landscape, they return. A solitary junco joins them. A blue jay swoops in, grabs a seed, and goes off to consume it, deep in the middle of a shrub thicket.
I watch them, seated at my desk, a few feet from a blazing woodstove. The sight of a neat stack of wood outside, protected from the blizzard by a tarp, is almost as warming as the stove. I’m working on my seed order.
That’s good, my husband says. “It means that summer’s coming.”
Yes, in the midst of winter we can dream of drifts of Lupin and waving fronds of Indian Grass.
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