This has been a great week as far as the weather goes.
My flower beds are cleaned out and ready for annuals and a fresh layer of mulch. The bushes are trimmed and the bird feeder is filled.
The wildlife is abundant, too. I’ve seen fuzzy bunny rabbits, flirty squirrels and a duck nesting in a tree.
Yes, a duck nesting in a tree.
This perhaps misguided mamma is about six feet off the ground all nice and cozy in the nook of three branches. Sounds great until you realize those babies, if they hatch, will have to get down. Ducklings can’t fly. Their wings are only a little more than an inch long when they hatch and they pretty much grow with the rest of them. Older ducklings may be able to but I’ve yet to see it.
I took her picture but she is very hard to distinguish from the tree. She is also brown.
I have spent some time thinking about this and I have a solution. Mamma duck should sit on the ground below the nest and let the babies jump down on her and then bounce to the ground. I’m sure it will work. Well, pretty sure.
I just love this time of year. You know it is officially spring when just after a rain, it smells like fish worms. The grass is a rich green and everything looks brighter and then you take a deep breath. Fish worms.
Well, those little worms better burrow deep because so far, there is at least one day next week with the prediction of snow flurries. Yes, snow. The high on Tuesday is supposed to be 47.
My furry companion was bit by the spring fever bug this week, too. She loves to go on her tie-out in the backyard and throw her head back and just sniff. I’m glad I don’t have to get 90 percent of my information through my nose.
I’d swear hers was broken sometimes. Like when she rolls in duck doo and smears it on her neck fur like an exotic perfume. She seems so proud after the deed is done and so indignant when I try to wipe the slimy mess off.
She can also spend an extraordinary amount of time sniffing a single blade of grass. Especially when she knows I’m ready to go inside. That’s when the bribe comes out. “Want a biscuit?” Well, all of a sudden that blade of grass becomes a non-issue and off we go up the porch.
Well, back to how much I have been enjoying the weather and everything that comes with it. There are people everywhere. They walk, ride bikes, play basketball and tennis, jog, walk their animals and just seem to have the need to poke their head out from a long winter’s nap.
Greetings are hollered out and returned and the whine of lawnmowers fills the air.
The kids are out and about a lot more and you can tell they are already antsy for school to be over. Suck it up, kiddies. Remember those days you got to stay home and build snowmen and play video games? It’s time to pay the piper.
The shorts have come out, too, and from that, there’s usually no turning back. Bring on the 47 degrees and possibility of snow. I’ll just dig out that warmer jacket and Sadie will have to wait until the frost melts to smell that blade of grass properly.
Ah. Spring. You gotta love its unpredictability.