Spring?

You can't see them very well, and this is just a tiny area,
but there are LOTS of robins out there!

The yard is full of robins. There must be a hundred or more. Saturday and Sunday, the temperature was in the upper 70s, and Friday it was 80. I spent the afternoon outside, cleaning up the garden beds, weeding, mulching – and sweating! I also watered some plantings. We are in a drought. My brother, who flies for the Forest Service, has been called in to work months ahead of “normal” fire season, fighting blazes across the state. We have a flocked Christmas tree on the porch. It looks as though it is covered in snow, but there will be no snow here. We set our little snowman on the steps. He is made of metal, otherwise he would melt. 

It is an unexpected treat to have warm winter days, but it is also unsettling. Over his long lifetime -- 98 years -- my daddy observed the slow but steady change in the weather on the farm. Corn ripened weeks earlier, first frost came later and later, irrigation was a must. And we’ve had “100-year” storms and floods on a pretty regular basis. The robins are lovely, but the seasons are out of sync.