Warm days warm hearts

The sun is shining. The snow is melting. Thoughts are turning to planting and fishing and things to enjoy when it's warm. Even the snow fleas have decided it's time to make an appearance.

snow fleas (little black specs)    © harrington

We're slated over the next week to have several consecutive days in the 50's and 60's. Life in My Minnesota can be good. Have you been hearing the chickadees singing this Spring? fee-bee and / or chick-a-dee-dee-dee. Yesterday it seemed as though we had every chickadee in six counties at the feeder. Some posed nicely for a portrait photograph.

black capped chickadee in oak tree   © harrington

Joyce Sutphen

Home to the Late Late Movie

This landscape like a supermarket aisle
draws me on. Flat and stocked
rows of suburbia, matchbox cars parked
in the driveways, frail little trees
strung tight and anchored to the yards.

and the chainlink fence with the shadow
lunging back and forth all morning, and the
plastic big-wheels on the graveled edge
of the road, white-blond hair of blue-eyed

boys flirting with speed, pedaling their way
into traffic, looking over their shoulders
to the houses set uncertainly in the cornfields
their mothers held captive by afternoon TV,
loneliness seeping through the vinyl blinds.

Until the fathers come home from the car shop,
from the lumber yard, from the freezer factory,
garage doors lifting, chains jerking in tracks,
the blond boys running across fat patches of grass,
the daughters glancing up from their books.

And sighs like ovens and the clatter of dinner
plates coming from kitchens, a sizzling in the pan,
stainless steel lifted to the mouth, the smoke of
conversations drifting from the chimneys, dissipating
over the gray branches of the leafless wind.

And later on these streets: in each house with
its drapes parted slightly, wafer of lamplight
caught on bare walls, blue of a video eye
flickering its gaze back into the night, the
refrigerators are opening, letting out the cold.

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