The Quiet Country House

Of Wild Geese and Snowy Skies..

The photo above is from the butterfly garden last April 6th.

And this photo is from the same garden yesterday.

A few days ago, April's full moon rose as round and bright as always, but I could not see it through the banks of heavy cloud that have filled our skies for most of April thus far. My favorite source for moon names, from Sharon Lovejoy's book Hollyhock Days, calls April's moon The Wild Goose Moon. This seems appropriate to me, for we have been seeing wild geese these past few weeks. They fly overhead, proclaiming their arrival in noisy, gladsome chorus. They land in the fields along with pairs of Sandhill cranes, providing an entertaining focal point as we peer through our windows in the late afternoon hours. I have not seen them in the last four days of blizzard-winds and heavy snowfall.

The red-breasted robins also returned to our northern climes a couple of weeks past. Since the blizzard arrived, the robins have been congregating near the edges of the paved back roads and highways. The snow melts faster on those dark road surfaces. Perhaps the robins are seeking heat or hoping for a morsel of food, which the frozen snow-covered ground cannot provide. I have never seen this behavior by robins... the congregating or the lingering at the roadsides. We will be happy when the snow melts and Mr. Wiggles (our name for the first robin to visit our property each year) and his friends can seek their worms amid the greening grass and flowers in our fields.