Day 97

I went for a run/walk for about 2km today, feeling a little miserable with a cold.  Everyone was out today, even the wood-frogs and a pair of chickadees gave me a little concert at the pond, and the deer were there with their disgruntled white tails whipping the air as they sped away.

All my feeding stations and the two birdbaths were in high demand, and the somewhat scraggly goldfinches who are still growing out their yellow feathers, were very pleased that I finally filled the Nyjer seed feeder.

After I had filled everyone's plates I left the door open, for the first time this year!  I could hear all the bird-calls and woodpeckers tapping, and then the screeches as the bully blue jays arrived en masse, their intimidating stiff-legged sauntering scaring some little birds, but the chipmunks know they are all show.  

All the birds were lining up for their spring baths in the clean clear new water, and there was much splashing and dabbling and sploshing and slopping.  Even Turkey-Lurkey drank from the bird-bath.

Turkeys are these beautiful large birds that live wild here in Massachusetts.  I have written extensively about them in my 2010 blog, but I love their genial ambling, their serene demeanors, their slow thoughtful movements, like old ladies in too-big raincoats, going for a gentle constitutional through the quiet forest.

And look, in true crocus fashion, they have sprung up fully-formed overnight!

In South Africa, when there is a strange very light overcast sky, so that they sun shines through, it is called "'n vlies voor die son", a fleece in front of/across the sun, a soft lacy shining fleece.

The man-made thing is the amazing poem by Irish poet Eavan Boland that one of my students showed me the other day: 


Quarantine
In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking- they were both walking - north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
there is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered.  How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.