We just got a couple inches of new snow. Wet stuff this time. With the temperature just above freezing and all, a lot of it soaked right into the ground—you should have seen the unmaintained dirt road—but it’s 16 °F tonight, and all the world is frozen now.
Winter could just as well be gone if anyone listened to me. After all, the light is different now. The height and angle suggest spring, especially in the morning. And I think the raccoons are back, because something is dismantling the bird feeders again. Mangled metal, nails pulled out!
Just heard a “bonk” at midnight. That might be raccoons. We have one of those barrel planters outside with a piece of plywood on it for a platform feeder. I use four or five grapefruit-sized rocks to hold it down. What I hear are the muffled THUMPS as the critters push them off to get the seeds stuck underneath. It sounds like car doors slamming in the dark, like something bad is coming for a visit. I’ve been known to turn on the outside light and crack the door to spy it, but it’s never there.
John Hamilton Farr lives at 7,000 feet in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. As New York Times best-selling author James C. Moore tells it, John is “a man attuned to the world who sees it differently than you and I and writes about it with a language and a vision of life that is impossible to ignore.” This JHFARR.COM site is the master writing archive. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on .png)
You must log in to post a comment. Log in now.