February
We have a book here called "Nature's Year in the Kawarthas." It describes February as "the gateway to spring." That may be true, but we have been having our first real stretch of unbroken winter weather the last few weeks. Yesterday afternoon I fed the cows on the upper pasture, then while I was spreading straw in their shelter the wind kicked up and soon the snow was blowing so hard they were only dim shapes feeding at the far side of the field, and at times I couldn't see them at all. We are having a lot of sunny days too, fortunately, and with the wind generator often spinning all night long, our system is producing plenty of energy for our needs without having to run the generator. Winter is usually the low-point for production in a solar-energy system.
Still, the signs of spring's approach are beginning to be felt. We're past winter's mid-point and the days are getting noticeably longer. This past week Sylvia heard the clear, ringing call of a Prairie Horned Lark, one of the first migrants to return to the area. Our resident birds have also begun singing more as they reaffirm or establish pair bonds and their breeding season begins. We have started a few plants in the kitchen, and the first sprouts are beginning to emerge from the soil. Our greenhouse needs to be replaced, but that is a project that will have to wait until next year.
I've also been reading Edwin Way Teale's book "North with the Spring." It is the chronicle of a 17,000 mile journey he and his wife made in the late 1940s. They began in the Florida Everglades in mid-February and traveled gradually north, following the progress of the season in the eastern United States through March to June. It will be fun to read and think about spring advancing towards us while we enjoy the last weeks of snow-shoeing, cross-country skiing, and snow-laden cedars, counting the signs that will mark spring's arrival. Crows and Canada Geese should be here soon.
The seasons, like greater tides, ebb and flow across the continents. Spring advances
up the United States at the average rate of about fifteen miles a day. It ascends
mountainsides at the rate of about a hundred feet a day. It sweeps ahead like a flood
of water, racing down the long valleys, creeping up hillsides in a rising tide. Most of
us, like the man who lives on the bank of a river and watches the stream flow by, see
only one phase of the movement of spring. Each year the season advances towards us
out of the south, sweeps around us, goes flooding away into the north. We see all
phases of a single phase, all variations of this one chapter in the Odyssey of Spring.
My wife and I dreamed of knowing something of all phases, of seeing, firsthand, the
long northward flow of the season.
- Edwin Way Teale, "North with the Spring"