Another spring! At last. Will wonders never cease, and so forth. I'm still going about in teeshirt plus sweatshirt layers, but in theory, it's now spring.
The ducks sure think so, same with the frogs. Earlier this month you couldn't hear God think out on our porch of an evening, what with all the sex-crazed amphibians croaking their wee hearts' desire from dusk to dawn and beyond. And in the daytime, we got ducks going at it hot and heavy. The male actually grips the female's head in his beak, just like cats, except marginally (at least in my imagination) less painful. The part you don't see with cats is when he shoves her underwater, which might explain all the outraged quacking and feather-combing she does after shaking his jiggly butt off not two seconds following. I'm watching this and thinking, well, it must work out somehow. Not like there's a shortage of mallards, after all.
Nola, having spent her formative adult years hanging out with naturalists, is jolly good at catching frogs and snakes. And being as she's just the bestest Nola ever, she shares. She found the prettiest little garter snake this afternoon, and I got to take it off to someplace she wasn't mowing and let it go. It curled round and round my fingers.
The little side creek is 'most dried up, and other sections of our copious spread of land have emerged from the swampy depths, another sign of spring-hath-sprung. And pollen covers the land. Also the car, and the floors and the decks and the pond's surface, not to mention the inner linings of our nasal passages. I am so far managing without drugging myself to the gills every day, but today was not so good: woke with a thumper of a sinus headache.
Despite the headache, this all has to be about as good as it gets.
