Spring?

I saw my first frost heave sign today and took the neon orange for what it is: a warning to slap a lid on the car mug. It’s a little ridiculous to think of spring on Feb. 7, especially in central Maine, but the lengthening days already had me leaning that way. Signs of spring. I’ll take what I can get.

The flocks of robins aren’t signs right now, despite how much everyone associates them with the turning season. These birds are wintering over, subsisting on an abundant crop of ornamental crabapples. Big flocks of cedar waxwings gorge on them as well. Today I watched as the waxwings, in their bandit masks, clasped the berries in their beaks, tipped their heads back a little, seemed to say, "slainte" and swallowed them whole.

Our chickens may be the toughest in Maine. They made a beeline for the coop door this a.m. even though windchill is near zero. I’d put them in, but they don’t want to go. They are grazing in the breeze on our lawn, open where the snow has blown and washed off. They look like mod squad sauntering across the yard. I like it when they simultaneously tip their heads and their tails shoot up.

Happy birthday Laura Ingalls Wilder, born 143 years ago today in Wisconsin. When I think of how the world changed during her lifetime, it makes Twitter and the Internet look like tin cans and string. Well, maybe not quite that simple. And then I stop and wonder, What would Laura Ingalls say about our inability to draw breath without reporting it near and far? For someone who thought it strange when her beau showed up on Tuesday when Sunday was soon enough, all this instant communication would have to be intrusive. Or would it? There is a certain (lost) pleasure in letters going back and forth, but wouldn’t she have liked to hear from her parents more often after she moved away from de Smet? When she went to San Francisco to visit Rose she could have transmitted words and pictures to Almanzo instantly. Ah, but then we’d likely have no real record. Who saves tweets and emails? How will future biographers reconstruct relationships when there’s no written record like we had with letters? How long will blog posts be saved? How reliable are personal interviews? With information leaving the world of print at an alarming rate, is it possible we’ll look back and wonder how we lived, and what we thought, even though this electronic world has to have led to the biggest verbal outpouring in history?