Daylight savings time has me sleeping odd hours in these transitions days when we have returned to early dark, with street lights ablaze by 7 p.m. What an odd, disorienting, unnatural feeling to awaken at 7:30 a.m. , to have slept through those lovely, near-still, silent productive hours of the morning before the animals begin to stir or the dew slides off the grass.
There was another frost last night, and the rain in the stone bird bath froze, but as I drove through town yesterday a few folks were out mowing their neon green overfed lawns. This is not at all normal for mid-March in the inland Northwest, but the weather is always erratic and I wouldn’t know what to call normal. Temperatures like to dart wildly and erratically in swings that make it difficult to dress and bring songbirds back early to huddle and shiver in down-fluff bundles deep inside the hedgerows and one particularly hard snap can wipe out most of our stone fruits before they form and wither the new spring flowers.
Today the sun is glorious, with a predicted high in the 60s, and a sky so blue it seems to leach into your eyes and impregnate the world with intensity. Everyone is grilling out and the sidewalks are alive with tricycles.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
March 16, 2010
Ruminations 