It's spring, and it’s safe to come out now. There are still a few wisps of snow here and there on the ground, but one good rain and it will be gone. There are birds in profusion and a few squirrels scurry about, but so far no flower or shrub has dared to bloom, a good thing, because it was well below freezing last night.
The other day I saw a flock of confused geese flying south, down the coast. Do they know something we don’t? Has the climate in Labrador become suddenly hostile? Does Al Gore know about this?
One of these days I will take my bike off its hook in the garage, fill the tires with air, squirt some oil on the axles, don the yellow helmet my safety-minded daughter gave me, and pedal down the dirt road to the paved street and along the beachfront. For a month or two this will be the ideal exercise, then the paved street will be jammed with cars that leave little room for cyclists, and the bike rides will be chancy, helmet or not.
The snowbirds will come back, and we will be glad to see them. The same can’t be said of the evil seagull, which I swear I saw the other day. As recounted in “The Seagull Wars,” this monster destroyed two screen sliders and otherwise terrorized this house last summer. Now, it appears, he’s ba-ack, and the war goes on – endlessly, it appears, just like Iraq.
The wind is up most of the time, cold from the north, and the seas are choppy. Peak gusts have topped 40 mph on many days lately – strong enough to send trash barrels rolling down the road and ripping the globe from one of the patio lights along our driveway. The beach is still deserted and a joy to walk, but a good jacket is a must, no matter what the thermometer says.
The sky has been a spectacular blue in recent days, with not a trace of a cloud from horizon to horizon, another byproduct of those stiff winds. That pristine sky is shown on the cover of my book, “Searching for Joan Leslie’ (available at lulu.com), and it looks like computer-generated trickery, but no, that’s the sky as it was when my son snapped the picture. All he had to do was add the copy.
In the early evening that bright beacon in the western sky is Venus. It doesn’t hang around very long, but it’s a dazzler. I wonder if the Venusians can look up at their night sky and see Earth, 67 million miles away. Probably not; I read somewhere that it is always cloudy on Venus.
