February’s annual malaise has set in. My mood reflects the sky’s gray clouds. My joints ache, brittle with frost. Each morning is more reluctant than the last, and each evening more welcome.
My instinct is to hide from February. To find a dry den, line it with blankets, and retreat into sleep’s warm sanctuary.
But then, when I woke to the storm-scented gusts of spring, I would regret my weeks of sleep. I would wonder what I had missed, while hibernating…
A final set of photos from Wednesday’s walk at Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge, which is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.
A rich variety of wildlife makes every visit a fascinating new adventure.
(The ducks pictured above are a new species for me, and I would love a little help identifying them. Are they Gadwalls?)
As much as I enjoyed taking these photos, I regret that I missed the deer.
And I’m aching to know who left the following tracks on a patch of sand near the trail.
There were two sets of tracks, side-by-side, moving in the same direction. The footprints were slightly smudged, but the tail-drag marks were clear enough. What do you think? Did I miss otters? Or are the tracks more lizard-like?
I can’t resist a mystery, and I would love to add deer photos to the archive. I’m already planning my next walk…
During my Wednesday walk at Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge, I heard this flock of birds before I saw them. Their whistles and scolds carried over the water, and I wondered what was causing all the excitement.
At first, they seemed chaotic and confused, a disorganized muddle of hunger and alarm. After watching a while, their behavior made more sense. They would land for a frantic spell of foraging, gulping down seeds and anything else they found in the trees and on the ground. Then, at some mysterious signal, they would erupt into the air and circle to a new location.
When they reached a small gravel road, they streamed back and forth across it, oscillating between dense stands of pine on either side.
The most riveting part of this experience, to me, was the soundtrack. Whenever the birds landed, they communicated with a grating cacophony of calls. But they were almost silent in the air. As they shifted back and forth over the road, their wings whirred an eerie echo of the nearby surf.
I heard them in my sleep last night, and I dreamed of flying.
I didn’t see any snow geese at Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge today, but I did see tundra swans.
My internal thesaurus was cataloguing synonyms for “elegant” when I noticed a commotion.
The swans were bathing! So graceful and majestic and…
… playful? They both paused after this undignified flail, as if to make certain no one was watching.
Then…
I couldn’t help laughing out loud as they splashed and rolled. A few minutes later, they shook out their feathers, folded their wings, and resumed their stately tour of bay.
I was captivated by the swans’ antics, and tonight my internal thesaurus has started compiling synonyms for “joyful”.
Late in January, Diane at bardessdmdenton tagged me with the Very Inspiring Blogger Award:
Here are the rules:
* Display the award logo on your blog
* Link back to the person who nominated you
* State seven things about yourself
* Nominate 15 other bloggers for this award and link to them
* Notify those bloggers of the nomination and the award’s requirements
As before, I’ve been struggling with the first rule. (Is it normal that my words dissolve into a mist of confusion and dismay when I try to describe myself?) Last time I talked more about cars than about myself, and this time I’m going to talk about furniture.
1. My favorite pieces of furniture are bookshelves. I have five sets of shelves in my office, one in the living room, and two in the guest room.
2. I keep my grandmother’s sewing machine in our living room, where it makes an excellent end table.
3. When I was about nine years old, Mother moved my great aunt’s antique vanity into my room. She told me to take very good care of it. Then, because I was nine, I put stickers on the mirror. I also broke a section of the trim. After Mother died in 2011, I brought the battered vanity to Virginia, scraped off the stickers, and repaired the trim. Now I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t need an antique vanity, but I can’t quite let go of it.
4. The first piece of furniture that my husband and I bought together was a very heavy coffee table. Every few years we move it from one side of the living room to the other, and somehow the simple act of moving it makes it look like an entirely new table.
5. After we bought our house, we spent the entire first summer staining and finishing a kitchen table, six chairs, an enormous chest of drawers, and a storage bench. I will never again buy unfinished furniture.
6. It took the cats eight years to destroy our first couch. They perfected their technique near the end, and our next couch lasted less than three years.
7. When selecting new furniture, bedspreads, or blankets, my primary concern is whether or not the cats will approve.
As for the final two rules, many of the blogs I follow do not participate in awards. So, instead of continuing the chain of tags and notifications, here are links to a few of my favorite recent posts:
“Poetry in Prose” – Delancey Stewart
“A Walk with Gratitude” – Life in the Bogs
“A Bald Eagle Hunts a Duck” – For the Love of Clouds and Nature
“Deer tracks” – Wood and Field
“Still” – Lynn’s Creativity Post
“February Photo Theme: Waterfalls” – Walter H. Smith
I’m delighted that Diane tagged me with this award, in part because it gives me another chance to recommend her wonderfully lyrical book. I reviewed A House Near Luccoli here, and you can read more about it here.
Rae Spencer 