The return of normalcy?

Earlier today the Better Half called to our attention the fact that there were three male cardinals outside, two in the tree and one at the feeder. At sunset yesterday we noticed a female cardinal searching for seeds on the deck. A pileated woodpecker, we haven't been able to confirm whether male or female, has been showing up at the suet feeder. The  fact that we're "enjoying" snow showers all day, plus the several inches that fell a couple of days before Christmas, seems to have moved things into a more typical winter pattern. There was even what looked like a purple finch at the feeder earlier today.

male cardinal awaiting turn at feeder

Photo by J. Harrington

Tuesday we'll do our last Community Supported Agriculture [CSA] pick-up for the year. We hope we get to complete our trip before the forecast snowstorm hits. Many of the roads we've been driving for the past few days are covered with compacted snow, ok but not great, interspersed with streaks of ice, instant, hopefully brief, traction loss. More snow on top of that isn't going to make longer drives any more enjoyable, although we've found that the gravel/dirt roads are less treacherous than those with blacktop. Most folks who drive gravel roads also have enough sense to slow down, unlike too many drivers on county and state highways.

pileated woodpecker at suet feeder

Photo by J. Harrington

Are you ready to start a new year? In most ways we're glad to put 2020 behind us, but we're even less certain of what may lie ahead than we are many years. We can't afford to accept a return to the "good old days" of 2008 -- 2016 because most of the crises we're facing: climate weirding; adaptation; sixth extinction; COVID-19 and its successors; and, at a minimum, unsustainably increasing inequality, haven not been addressed sufficiently to leave us much time to respond with gradual, coordinated transitions. "Continuing resolutions," or their equivalent, aren't going to yield the results we need. It's not yet clear that enough folks recognize the significance of both the constellation of issues and the brevity of the lead time to address them. A worthwhile resolution for the new year would be to study the effectiveness of solutions we're busy implementing rather than doing more studies before we implement anything.

Year’s End

By Richard Wilbur

Now winter downs the dying of the year,   

And night is all a settlement of snow;

From the soft street the rooms of houses show   

A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,   

Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin   

And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake

The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell   

And held in ice as dancers in a spell   

Fluttered all winter long into a lake;   

Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,   

They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns   

Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone   

A million years. Great mammoths overthrown   

Composedly have made their long sojourns,   

Like palaces of patience, in the gray

And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise   

But slept the deeper as the ashes rose

And found the people incomplete, and froze   

The random hands, the loose unready eyes   

Of men expecting yet another sun

To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.   

We fray into the future, rarely wrought

Save in the tapestries of afterthought.

More time, more time. Barrages of applause   

Come muffled from a buried radio.

The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.