Good Friday thoughts.

Snow is melting. Cloudy skies have some thin spots and patches of blue even. It’s almost Easter weekend. There are enough good things happening that we shouldn’t be dismayed that too many humans turn April Fool’ into a daily event. This morning I saw an add for a helpful solution to much of the aggravation and agitation triggered by living in contemporary society. There’s a helpful new drug that wasn’t developed by big pharma. Take 500 mg of fukitol, followed by a nap.

bumblebee on purple lupine

Photo by J. Harrington

The Better Half sent me a link this morning to a story in the Washington Post that cheered me in at least two ways:

1. the subject matter offers hope for protecting pollinators, especially bees, (and so, much of our food) and;
2. it was one of the better written news articles I’ve read in a long time.

I don’t know if this link will work, but you’re welcome to try it: https://wapo.st/4cMGQYa

By this time next week, I expect most, maybe all, of the snow to be gone and the dogs and I will again enjoy our walks down the driveway and along the road instead of treating them as a necessary chore. I bet we’ll even return to walking to the pond north of us to see if Canada geese or wood ducks have stopped to rest. I wont’t be wearing Yak-Trax or a down parka and the dogs won’t be wondering why I filled their ditch full of snow. Shortly after that, we can start watching for spring ephemerals while listening for more bird song. Spring will have arrived in more than name only.

Do you suppose local news would be more successful if they/it published and practiced more solutions journalism stories? I’m more than a little tired of reading the abundance of bad news that mentions not a bit of what to do about it. In fact, for a couple of local newspapers I check regularly for projectsI’m trying to follow, they frequently lack any in depth coverage that didn’t come from a news release. At the time we originally were heavily dependent on a free press, we barely had a functioning postal system. Now we’re back to a barely functioning postal system and have a multitude of information sources full of mis and disinformation. Whatever happened to fact checkers and copy editors?

Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself

Wallace Stevens
1879 – 1955

At the earliest ending of winter, 
In March, a scrawny cry from outside 
Seemed like a sound in his mind. 

He knew that he heard it, 
A bird's cry at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six, 
No longer a battered panache above snow . . . 
It would have been outside. 

It was not from the vast ventriloquism 
Of sleep's faded papier mâché . . .
The sun was coming from outside. 

That scrawny cry—it was 
A chorister whose c preceded the choir. 
It was part of the colossal sun, 

Surrounded by its choral rings, 
Still far away. It was like 
A new knowledge of reality.

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