winter lie fallow

I was sitting on my back patio in the brief respite between the Canadian fronts, today, watching the birds sweep over the lawn for scraps.

Despite the severity of winter, it is not winter itself that is the most deadly time for the creatures of the world. Spring is the worst, right at the beginning of it. Food stores run out. Acorns stored for winter sprout and break through the grass green and alive and inedible. The end of winter and the beginning of spring is the worst moment, the darkness before the dawn, and the flush of loquats and mulberries feed the world until the rest of the world wakes up.

Winter is still here, still passing through. I watched the brazen animals desperately scrounging through my raised beds and pots. I realized that the seeds I had planted must no longer be present in the soil. I would have to plant again, something else. Maybe I should spread birdseed and gruet out in the grass and cover the pots and growing places with wires or tarps until germination comes.

Another storm, another miserable flush of winter, in a day or so, and then quite nearly spring.

The winds blow out all the world. The terrible winds blow down from the north.

I would rather think of these things than anything else.

The preorders struggled to arrive in all this terrible weather, but they arrived. They are signed and sent away.

I have guest posted.

Let me rest. Let me lie fallow a while and watch the earth pass out of the worst times, that early spring, where there's nothing out there, and everything is fighting to start.