The Bluebird Box, Year Two
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Spring Cleaning Without Spring Cleaning
Spring cleaning, as my grandmother understood it, was a real thing with a real timeline. Windows came off their frames and got washed inside and out. Rugs went over the line in the back yard and got beaten with a broom. Curtains came down and went into the washtub. The pantry got emptied and the shelves got wiped and everything that had spent the winter in the house got aired out, one item at a time, on a sunny day in April when the heat had been off long enough that the house finally felt cold and the open windows could not be resisted.
March’s Two Faces
March in the upper latitudes has two faces and it shows them both every year, sometimes in the same week. Early March is still winter. Late March is something else, not quite spring, but not winter anymore in any honest accounting. The shift happens unevenly and never in the same week twice, but it happens, and watching it happen is one of the things I most look forward to in the calendar.
First Robin, and What Time It Came
The first robin of the year on the actual lawn arrived at 6:42 in the morning on Tuesday. I am being specific because I had been waiting for it, and the time matters less than the date but I will record both.
A Weekend at a Desert Edge Hotel
Why I Stopped Cleaning the Yard in March
The First Long Light
The first long evening of the year happened on a Tuesday at the end of February. I noticed it because I was washing dishes after dinner and the light over the sink was still natural light, not artificial, which it had not been for months. The sun would not set for another twenty minutes. I had eaten dinner in the dark all winter without thinking about it. Suddenly I had not.
Bird Song at 5:47 AM
The first song sparrow of the year sang at 5:47 in the morning on a Thursday in late February. I noted the time because I had been awake for nearly an hour, sitting by the open kitchen window with coffee, and the morning had been silent up to that point in the particular way late winter mornings are silent, with the chickadees still asleep and the cardinals not yet warming up. Then a few faint notes from somewhere near the back hedge, and a second pass, and on the third pass I had it. Song sparrow. The first one of the year. Two weeks early.
Driving Out to Where the Cranes Land
The sandhill cranes stage in the Platte River valley of central Nebraska every spring, and the staging is one of the great natural events of North America. Around half a million birds funnel through a stretch of river roughly eighty miles long, between late February and early April, on their way north from wintering grounds in Texas and Mexico to breeding territories in Canada and Alaska and Siberia. I drove out to see them last week.
When the Cardinal Returned to His Branch
