February 31

"A softer energy?" (my premature characterization of this fickle month yesterday)

C'mon, we're talking about March here. Or could it be that February stowed away? Maybe we should just give February 31 days and start March tomorrow, on March 4th, which sounds like a setting out anyway.

I mean, I know what I meant by a softer energy: birds in their element, not spending their energy defending against the elements, for a change, not hustling to get from point A to point B.

I picture yesterday's nuthatches heading down the trunk a little faster today, wound a little tighter. It's a different face of March. It looks like how I think of Poland during the 1940s: dour, beetle-browed, stark, suspicious. Back to the hunkered gargoyle. A few flakes this morning, too, kind of a distracted, fretful flurry.

Lower Mystic Lake might be ice-free, but Spy Pond still wears a thin, what-are-you-lookin'-at, ice cover. A kind of tar pit for skaters. Except for a little canal along the shore, where a pair of swans—neither one a blogger—seemed unconcerned with the weather, the month, the date, anything but their own swanniness.

As for me, I indulge my almanackiness. Perhaps we should let each day define itself, rather than correspond or not correspond to the definition of the month. 365 separate entities, which when you stand back from them blend into the shadings of a season in progress.
--We already do.
--Oh. Yeah, I guess.
--Are you going to get this overwrought about every contrary day in this contrary month?
--You never know.
--Swell.