The last overcast day of the year morning coffee muses.
It’s a reasonable 47° out on this misty and damp final morning of 2017. And as I compose this my first flock of cedar waxwings just settled into the top of the red oak. As I keep watching, the flock keeps growing. It started at about 20 birds and has now grown to over 50.
Winter is coming back to start the New Year off right. The high today is only forecast to hit 51° before it starts falling with a low tomorrow morning of 30° or below. Then the real cold settles in. I think this is the first time since we moved in over six years ago that the heat has been on continuously for over a week, and from the looks of things, will be on for another week or so.
In the past, sunny days have made it so that with heat gain during the day and relatively high levels of insulation, I’ve had to run the AC rather than the heat. Except for the relatively few nights when the temperatures dipped into nodding range of freezing.
And the waxwings keep circling about. They seem to have decided that the cedars and the cypress trees provide more protection than the bare oak limbs.
There’s enough wind blowing through the pines to give the world a background sigh… it’s funny about those pines. I planted the first one over twenty years ago. It was a little over a foot tall, roots and all. All packaged up in a plastic tube from a Boy Scout troop somewhere that Sherry brought home. Somewhere along the line I dug up two more seedlings growing in the woods around here. A few years later I picked up three in gallon cans at Poverty Point Nursery. Now there are a dozen or so growing back there. Half of which seeded themselves.
To think, many years ago I wood wander out at night and sit on a wooden bench under that first pine. It was far enough from the house to be away from the sounds of people… and I would sit with my back against the trunk and listen to the wind. It didn’t take much wind for the pine to talk to me. It was always a comforting sound.
Bacon and eggs are calling me to the stove.
