Spring Buds

Winter, for all practical purposes, is behind us in this part of the world.

Truth is, winter never really found us this trip around the sun.

We had a couple or three episodes of, what for us, was the cold stuff. There were several short spells where that extra underlayer felt good when the wind was chilly and blowing out of the Northern Regions.

But for winter? It wasn’t much of one.

Except for the triple back to back to back bouts of Upper Respiratory junk that hit us like sledge hammers.

It’s not unusual to have a mild winter like we’ve had this time around. It is, however, extremely unusual for us to find ourselves traipsing back and forth to Urgent Care. Oh. And the deal with the injured Peroneal Nerve that has made a significant … hopefully temporary - going on three months now and still hobbling and limping … alteration in this important thing called Bi-Pedal Locomotion.

It’s great to see things turning green. I was thinking that we were having a False Spring but it sure looks like an Early Spring in the making.

It was the Black Willows that started greening up first. The first leaves of the Red Maples are popping red color as the leaves emerge before turning green. Some of the wild huckleberries are still blooming. Some of them, especially where they get a lot of sun, are completely leaved out. There’s more than enough tree pollen causing a lot of sneezing, wheezing, and cussing. Tree pollen. The downside to Spring breaking loose.

We are not completely done with the cool stuff that filters down before dissipating. A light frost shone on roof tops this morning. There could be a couple more of those before the middle of April.

If we were holding ourselves to a set schedule to get some needed projects finished, and others started, we would be several months behind schedule. Between these winter bouts of URI, and learning to get around on a foot that doesn’t receive instructions from the brain properly, pushing any kind of self-imposed schedule in and around the cabin really hasn’t been practical. It’s been enough to manage and maintain our 4-day commute finishing up what we’ve been doing in the employment department. Those LONG days are soon to be wrapped up and stored away in the historical section of the David and Shirli life-library.

I started tilling the new garden spot a week after that first bout with the URI thing. (It was during that bout that I rolled my ankle and did the nerve damage.) I must have looked something like Chester Goode (Dennis Weaver) on the early episodes of Gunsmoke wrestling that tiller around. We have three rows of potatoes planted in the new ground and are waiting on getting closer to late March and early April to plant some other things that a possible frost would make a mess of.

Just below the rows of potatoes are some thornless blackberry plants that we salvaged from our other place.

We also, somewhere in experiencing our contrary winter mix, managed to form and dig what will eventually become a raised garden bed in front of the cabin. We’ll start planting it like it is, keep adding carbon rich soil building material in a lasagna fashion to it as we go, and gradually grow a nice bed of soil.

Moving to a new area is an interesting proposition, especially when it is a small community. New faces stand out in small communities where everybody knows everybody from way back there. Small communities can tend toward being clannish and closed. We’ve not found folks to be rude, unfriendly, snobbish, or stuck-up. Curious and careful? Yes. And rightly so. We respect that. It is, after all, a crazy world we live in these days and it seems the craziness is only getting crazier. The thing about a small community like this is that you either came here by birth, married into the community, or (like us) chose to leave the hustle and bustle behind and moved here for the solitude and simplicity.

It’s all good.

Locals aren’t in a hurry to get to know us.

We aren’t in a hurry to get to know the locals.

We consider it a mutual respect thing.

We didn’t move here to try to persuade anyone to our way of thinking. That’s the quickest way, in a small community, to shoot yourself in both feet. And we’re too dang old and set in our ways for anyone with a grain of sense to bother with wasting their time trying to persuade us to their way of thinking.