(Photo is view from my home office door which opens on to the front porch of my beautiful home in Queidersbach, Germany.)
It has been snowing for a week.
All the locals told us it would be a hard winter. They were right, but seems a large part of the world is experiencing the same misery. Where we are trying to move from is covered in a white blanket even as the place we are moving to is getting pounded hard for the second time this year. "We haven't had much snow in five or six years," my cousin told me when I inquired as to the winter weather in Blacksburg.
It was certainly not our plan to move in February. We wanted to be out of here before then but all the accidents and recovery times just kept pushing us later and later.
This morning I cannot see the dense ivy at my front door. The trees are coated white yet again--the last coating never left, it just got added to. The funny front yard sculpture of a dog with his nonexistent head stuck in a hole in the ground is unseen, the only hint of his location being marked with a little mound of snow over the tip of his tail. Inside the metal body is a complete ant colony I discovered when I tried to move it to a new location. What are they doing now, buried in frozen darkness? I should have removed him and my favorite terracotta yard items into the garage while I had the chance this fall.
At the side patio I have been sprinkling seed on the bricks to make it easier for all the birds to find. I will run out soon. Seven fat blackbirds are either hunkered down in the deep snow, puffed out and unmoving, or hopping around pecking to find whatever they can not covered by the fall from last night. A netted bag of suet and nuts takes a while to get their attention. It is frozen and hard to eat. I should put on my boots and fill up the feeder. Grand tits, nuthatches, chaffinches and enormous jays are regular visitors. This morning, a solitary blackbird sits motionless inside the empty feeder, wondering why the filler-upper has been shirking her duties.
Inside the house, the packer-upper is hunkered down from the weather starting her third housebound day wondering why her "feeder" is so incredibly full and trying to get it ready to empty out.
All the locals told us it would be a hard winter. They were right, but seems a large part of the world is experiencing the same misery. Where we are trying to move from is covered in a white blanket even as the place we are moving to is getting pounded hard for the second time this year. "We haven't had much snow in five or six years," my cousin told me when I inquired as to the winter weather in Blacksburg.
It was certainly not our plan to move in February. We wanted to be out of here before then but all the accidents and recovery times just kept pushing us later and later.
This morning I cannot see the dense ivy at my front door. The trees are coated white yet again--the last coating never left, it just got added to. The funny front yard sculpture of a dog with his nonexistent head stuck in a hole in the ground is unseen, the only hint of his location being marked with a little mound of snow over the tip of his tail. Inside the metal body is a complete ant colony I discovered when I tried to move it to a new location. What are they doing now, buried in frozen darkness? I should have removed him and my favorite terracotta yard items into the garage while I had the chance this fall.
At the side patio I have been sprinkling seed on the bricks to make it easier for all the birds to find. I will run out soon. Seven fat blackbirds are either hunkered down in the deep snow, puffed out and unmoving, or hopping around pecking to find whatever they can not covered by the fall from last night. A netted bag of suet and nuts takes a while to get their attention. It is frozen and hard to eat. I should put on my boots and fill up the feeder. Grand tits, nuthatches, chaffinches and enormous jays are regular visitors. This morning, a solitary blackbird sits motionless inside the empty feeder, wondering why the filler-upper has been shirking her duties.
Inside the house, the packer-upper is hunkered down from the weather starting her third housebound day wondering why her "feeder" is so incredibly full and trying to get it ready to empty out.
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