The last few days have been warm enough for open windows and bare feet. The yard looks like winter, but the sky looks like summer.
Warm wind rattles through bare branches and ripples over a raveled carpet of leaves. Migrating birds gather in restless flocks, and I wonder if they regret flying south too soon.
Or maybe the birds know best. After all, the calendar insists that December is here, even if the sky doesn’t agree.
With swirling breezes and temperatures in the seventies, today might have been mistaken for spring.
The pear tree shrugged off its cloak of leaves and stood all day, bare-limbed, in a pool of gold and brown.
Robins and warblers perched on sunlit branches, their restless urge to forage temporarily forgotten.
But today’s weather shouldn’t fool any of us, trapped as we are in winter’s web.
An early dusk approaches, wheeling night behind it. Sleep is creeping through the yard, with months to go before waking.
Robins pipe a shrill warning whenever I enter the yard, freezing rabbits and squirrels and warblers mid-meal.
Their tense silence intensifies the pear tree’s rattle, the dry wind-notes that flash red and gold in chilly sunshine.
Perhaps an early snow will muffle it all, an icy blanket for the long dark hours ahead…
I don’t remember when the ginger lilies arrived. Years and years ago, long enough that I can’t remember what the yard looked like without them.
We started with eighteen bulbs, which I naively planted in pots because I didn’t know what a ginger lily was. I only knew that Mother had fallen in love with a vase of cut blooms given to her by a friend. She said the flowers smelled like warm cookies and looked a little like large, exotic orchids.
Mother’s friend gave us a box of beautiful pink-tinged bulbs, which I divided into three pots. Then I waited for spring to deliver a crop of cookie-scented flowers.
Instead of flowers, I got something that resembled corn. Each lovely bulb produced a green spike that quickly shot up into a leaf-wrapped stalk, taller and taller as summer wore on. In May they were knee high. In June they reached my hip. By August, they were head high with stalks as thick as chair legs. I had to brace their pots against the fence and support their weight with stakes.
Finally, September brought flowers, which were every bit as fragrant as promised. Less than half of the plants were able to bloom, constricted as they were in the pots, but it was enough to make me a life-long fan.
In November, my husband and I broke the pots with a hammer, because the bulbs had grown so tightly packed that we couldn’t get them out any other way. We cleared three beds in the yard, divided the tangled bulbs, and covered them with deep layers of mulch. After an anxious winter, we raked away the mulch and found dozens of spikes sprouting in all three beds. And so began years of delight…
For me, winter starts when I cut the ginger lilies.
So today, even though it was warm enough to open the windows, winter arrived in the yard. Our forecast calls for temperatures near freezing Saturday night, and I didn’t want to risk losing any of the bulbs to frost.
As I worked my way through the tangle of stalks, I recovered three chimes that had broken off of a wind chime and two birdhouses that had fallen during one of the recent storms. Somehow, repairing the wind chime made me feel a little less guilty about the lingering scent of unfinished blooms.
The cats followed my progress, moving from window to window as I moved from bed to bed.
(Please excuse Vanna’s sour expression. She was trying to ignore the fact that there is room for two cats on that perch. Fortunately, a flock of robins arrived shortly after this picture was taken, providing a distraction from the uncomfortable standoff.)
The robins were soon joined by several warblers and a pair of hungry squirrels.
Today’s strangest sighting was this very disheveled red admiral butterfly. It seemed to be heading south, perhaps following the opposite path of spring’s massive red admiral migration.
Wherever it was going, I hope it gets there safely. And I hope it was able to pause, for a moment, and enjoy tonight’s beautiful sunset.
Rae Spencer 