It has been difficult to avoid winter’s icy fingers this week. It isn’t just that the temperatures have been low — lows in the single digits, highs in the teens — but the cloud cover prevents the sun from helping out. The temperature in the shop has gotten down to 30 degrees and it has never been below 40 degrees before. The south and east facing windows help it stay much warmer than the outside temperature in spite of no heat. I’ve abandoned the cave and stayed in the house the last few days because it seemed silly to try to heat even just the corner where my desk is enough to be comfortable. We are already running space heaters in the chicken house and guinea tower 24 hours a day just to try to keep the fowl alive. The electricity bill will be bad enough with adding to it unnecessarily.
Joyce has been feeding the local fauna, possums, foxes and stray cats, mostly. Early one morning while it was still dark we watched from the kitchen window as a fox circled the juniper next to the driveway. It kept peering up into the branches and we surmised it had spotted some roosting birds it would like to make a meal of. Eventually it climbed into the tree and, sure enough, several doves skedaddled. Brer fox came away empty handed. A day or two later I saw a very large squirrel race to a tree and up the trunk. I didn’t get a good look but I couldn’t think, in spite of the size, what else would be so nimble climbing a tree trunk. I kept watching, though, and it turned out to be a fox. This was during the day and apparently it was in high spirits because the sun was out for a change. It gamboled way with its tail arched like cats do when they are being playful.
Saturday the sun came out and temperature came up. The Abster had a volleyball tournament which took most of her day. After spending the morning watching her play, I came home and spent the afternoon with Li’l r while Chris went to watch. It was warm enough to resume watering the tree line. There was mud around from the melted snow but there hadn’t been enough moisture to preclude the watering. There was enough, however, for Rebecca to make a mess of her nice school shoes. I tried to scrape and wash them off as much I could. Kari didn’t berate me the next time I saw her so maybe I did enough.