Goodbye April


primrose
Evening primrose, year two

April blew its way out Tuesday and Wednesday.  Can’t say as I’m sorry to see the month go, considering the sorry state of its weather.  It took me nearly an hour to sweep Kansas off our front porch Friday.  All over town there are speckled cars, the result of dust and a sprinkling of rain.  The car washes are doing a land office business, which makes sense since land is what everybody is washing off.   I don’t remember the wind blowing so persistently out of the north; from Monday through Saturday morning, the north wind blew, harder at times than others but it never relented completely until Saturday afternoon when it switched to the south.  Joyce was hampered in her planting but she kept after it.  Not much else one can do.

The ducks are still around.  When I ran water down the irrigation ditch on the west to water trees they had a high old time swimming up and down the ditch.  There are not many bodies of water around so they have to make do with what they can find.  On the way to track practice one evening, Li’l r and I saw a mallard pair, maybe the one that frequents SA, standing in a yard where the sprinklers were going full blast.  They looked very contented just standing in the deluge.  We saw two drakes fly off the pond and just a minute or two later a single drake land on the pond.  Joyce speculated that the hen told the two, uh, visitors they better get going before her mate came back.

Some friends of the neighbors needed something to keep some chickens in so Chris gave them the chicken tractor he and his dad built several years ago.  He did a good job on it and it was a nice piece of furniture, but it was heavy and hard to move so it has been parked next to the chicken yard the last two or three years.

Ever the optimists, we’ve been planting flowers around the house.  Except for the snapdragons, we’ve tried to go with plants that don’t require as much water a some do.  Some of the ones we planted last year survived and are coming on pretty strong.  The butterfly bush was off and running but got nailed by the freeze we had a couple of weeks ago.  It and the other things that suffered from the cold have mostly shrugged the setback off and are filling out nicely.  I don’t think it’s my imagination, but to me the trees I’ve been watering through the winter are looking better.  Some even look good.  Some, in spite of their improvement, still have a long way to go before they could be described as lush.   All I can do is keep pumping up water that seeped down to the aquifer from rain that probably fell on SA and the surrounding area during the Eisenhower administration and spray it on the trees.  Most, no doubt, is lost to evaporation but with each passing day we get closer to that wet spell I know is coming.

Saturday at Wildcat Bluff I saw the first kingbird, or bee martin as Grandmother Rockwell used to call them, of the year.  Wildcat Bluff has returned from a two or three year hiatus and they were celebrating their re-grand opening.  Li’l r and I went out there to see what was going on.  It was afternoon and a little too warm for Rebecca so we didn’t stay long.   Sunday I saw the first kingbird on SA.