Chickens close their eyes while pecking!

And an hour later, the next band of snow swung through.

Cut flower season has returned. My vases have been so lonely, my windowsills so naked.

These may be the lucky ones. Their companions, outside tonight:

Let’s go back to this, shall we? Isn’t that color a shock to the heart gone dead during winter?

Now that’s better.

Damage control begins in the morning.  I suspect that soon there will be many short-stemmed daffodil arrangements in this house.

Woke to three inches of snow on Monday, yesterday started with socked-in fog and ended with the wind blowing the broom straw in the fields flat to the ground. And today was 62 degrees and sunny with a dusting of snow forecast overnight.

Spring.

In my front yard right now.

These tiny irises—planted just last fall—are just a few inches tall, and yet their color is so violent in this winter landscape that to look upon them assaults the eyes. In the best possible way.

Tuesday morning it rained harder than I’ve heard it rain in a long time. By midday, though, the skies were clear. So I headed out to walk up a mountain at Mint Springs Valley Park. I figured I owed Tucker an outing as he’d been inside all day Monday while I attended my master gardener class.

The rain was still pouring down the mountain, turning the trails into creeks. It made for beautiful but very muddy hiking. I have many times swum in the lake at Mint Springs, which has a nice sandy beach and is ringed by mountain ranges. But this was my first time on the trails at the park.

There were a couple of old homestead chimneys along the path.

And the lime green evidence of spring just starting to appear.

I was hiking along the ridgetop and was clobbered by a fragrance memory as I entered a grove of pines. For a minute I was zapped more than a decade back to college and hiking in the pine forests of Mount Lemmon near Tucson, Arizona.

Looking southwest over Greenwood toward Nelson County.

First tick of the season, crawling in the waistband of my jeans. It hadn’t bitten me yet, but definitely signaled the insect misery of the summer to come.

Super happy flying trail dog

The upper lake at the end of the hike. In all we did a few miles up, and then down, the Little Yellow Mountain. The trails aren’t extensive at Mint Springs, but they travel through a nice variety of topography and best of all, I was the only person on them.

As I was leaving the park I saw this blazing barn in an old apple orchard. I ditched the car, jumped out,

scrambled across a creek on this handy fallen tree,

and got a few photos right before the sun ducked behind the mountain and the whole scene went dead.

Don’t read Annie Proulx in front of the wood stove alone during a power outage while heavy snow blows horizontally outside the window and the wind screams down the chimney. YOU WILL FREAK YOURSELF OUT!

Instead, try Tina Fey’s “Bossypants.” Good for a unexpectedly feminist laugh and a reminder of 21st century luxuries like “30 Rock.” And, oh, t.v. And electricity.

And when you’ve read that straight through, continue on with a healthy dose of Joel Salatin’s “Folks, This Ain’t Normal.” Which will make you feel so wonderfully normal as you get up to fill your wood stove with wood you fed, named, petted, felled, split, stacked and carried in yourself.

P.S. Please do read Annie Proulx at any other time. She is just such a freaking badass in the way she lays down a story, and her writing thrills me in a way few others do.

I came down from bed this morning to find a small male cardinal trapped on the back porch. He flew this way and that, banging his head into the glass walls with a trapped bird’s confused panic. I was afraid he’d kill himself, so I opened the door and tried to shoosh him out. That just made him bang even harder. So in one of his moments of postcollision confusion I tried to grab him with my bare hand. He squawked like a parrot, loud enough to bring my dog running from the field in front of the house. Each time my hand approached, the bird opened his surprisingly large orange beak wide enough to swallow a fingertip and threatened to do just that. I have been around enough birds to know to stay away from that sort of display, so I reckoned that I’d catch him up by his tail just like I do the chickens.

Well, when I grabbed the cardinal’s tail most of it came away in my hand as the bird shot through the open door and away to the forest. It’s a weird sensation to be left holding half of a speedily departed creature in your hand whist watching its other half take flight. Kind of like pinning a skink only to see it scuttle away, sacrificing the blue twitching tip of its tail.

I hope the cardinal can do okay without most of his tail feathers. But I guess it’s better that than a broken neck.

to take a soil sample for tomorrow’s master gardener class.

As if my neighbors didn’t already think I was a freak, now I am outside at 10:00 p.m. in windy subfreezing weather, wearing boots and pajamas, working by lantern light to extract earthworms from shovelfuls of dirt destined for the Virginia Tech Soil Testing Lab.

Crazy, yes. But I suspect my teachers wouldn’t be too sympathetic if I claimed my dog ate my soil sample.