Weekend before last, I was walking around the lawn and woods, noticing strangeness. There were blossoms on the honeysuckle – and several violets in the lawn. I also noticed violets in friends’ lawns. And all the marigolds were still blooming. Yet there were no tiny buds at all on most of the trees, where they should have been. At that point, we were still in the drought, which now seems to be behind us for a while.
Hawk flew over the garden one day last week when I startled him by opening the door, starting to feed the birds. Whenever I look out and nothing is happening in the yard, I know there’s a cat, a hawk, maybe the fox – something keeping the other critters still. I was glad to see Hawk, because he hadn’t been by in a while. And I haven’t seen Fox since October.
Now that we’re having a real cold snap – though the pansies seem fine with it – maybe all the flowers and trees will get back to normal. What a relief that would be.
But maybe we shouldn’t count on it. There was a dead coyote out in the street yesterday, clearly hit by a passing car. And as all of us who pay attention to totem animals know, Coyote is the Trickster.
A dead coyote on a Cincinnati street. What could be weirder than that?