Snow

The snow finally came on Saturday, and while it’s hanging around on the garden beds and deck, it never stuck to the driveway nor roads.  Just an inch or two.  The clouds have been with us since, but haven’t deposited anything additional.

It was cold this morning when I ventured out to drive over to the pool.  The sky was lighter than usual, with daylight savings time ended for another year.  The kids won’t have to pick their way to school in the dark, stumbling over debris on the sidewalks.  They seemed a much livelier bunch today. 

After my swim, with smoothie in hand watching at the big picture window in our living room, I like to take in the neighborhood.  We live just around the corner from an elementary school, so the kids (and there are a lot of them; my husband refers to our area as a ‘rookery’) walk to and from school each day.  In the morning they go by in small bunches, hauling what looks like tons of stuff in their low-slung backpacks.  The afternoon homeward migration starts when the adult brother of a neighbor marches off to the school, muttering loudly to himself.  He’s autistic.  Then, several minutes later, here he comes again, tromping along ahead of seven or eight kids who peel off one or two at a time into their houses along the way.  He sets a brisk pace, so the littlest ones lag behind.  After the first week or so of school, they don’t even try to keep up.  The last three kids follow him into their home, a few doors up the block from us.  This ritual and his march to church on Sundays are the only times I see him.  A small school bus picks him up in the morning, probably for a ‘sheltered workshop’ or some such thing, then drops him home just after lunch time.  I see the bus, but usually not him.  The only reason I know he’s autistic is that about a year ago we got a solicitation in the mail from his family for donations to the national Autism Foundation.

Later

The day is progressing into evening.  The birds have been especially active today, seemingly hundreds of them startling up from the ground and into the bower.  They swoop and dive, dodge and veer, much like schools of fish in the air.  The wind and the snow make the change to winter more definite for them, I’m sure, and their desperation to bulk up is palpable.  My mate grows seedy plants just for them and they are taking full advantage of his generosity.  There are sunflowers of all sizes and sorghum, parsley, oregano and other late seeding plants.  All for the birds.  So our yard is alive with sparrows, finches, juncos, scrub jays and ravens this time of year.  All shouting at each other, but often feeding side by side, too.  A covey of quail share our backyard.  They are a cautious lot, usually, moving under cover around the perimeter.  Now that the cold is upon us, though, they have discovered that the shortest distance between two points really is a straight line and can be seen racing across the open paths between the beds.  And the occasional squirrel visitation is just a streak of gray-brown out of the corner of the eye.  All this frantic activity among the critters makes me worry this will be a harsh winter season.  Wooly worm predictions and all that.

Well, time to make a cup of tea and think about dinner.