Grumpy, yet Gorgeous

April delivered a shock last week - a snow shower that had an accumulation of about 2 inches. It made me feel so bad-tempered and grumpy that everything had become white again, but it looked gorgeous despite my dissatisfaction with this little setback!

Dale even had to take shelter in the carport to get his handyman jobs done, and traipse back and forth through snow. Spring flakes always seem to be large, easily captured mistakenly in photos:

And here I was, busy painting with a color called Spring Hill on this cruel day!

Dragon Horns

I was delighted to find this beautiful green lichen amongst the moss last week - I think it's possibly dragon's horn lichen (Claydonia squamosa). It has the scaly, pointy spires covered in scales. 

It's in the same genus as the very colorful British soldier lichen, and very moss-like. I love this shade of green - it reminds me of smoky sea glass or the foamy green of the ocean when waves break.

To give an indication of how teeny and delicate these threads (dragon horns!) are, I included my thumb for scale

Spring!

Wood ducks have returned!

Mallards squawk their loud presence

Sleek mergansers dive ...

Pedestals

Pedestals of ice

Decorate my melting cove

Different each day

Spring Drops

I was intrigued by what looked like glassy buds on this shrub at Hannaford's - turned out to be drops of spring rain clinging onto last years' nubs!

Empty Spaces

Our house is looking so empty as we take down pictures, coathooks and wallmounts, and remove scatter rugs.

 Without posters and pictures, spaces echo if you sneeze!

Our living room has become so much bigger without all the trimmings and decor.

And gosh, am I tired of opening paint cans and cleaning up after the seemingly continual 'touch ups'.

and all the while, the days are slipping by ...

Leftovers

Lots of people say they hate leftovers. But for me, leftovers can be a good thing when it comes to melting ice and snow! It portends the change of season in the direction I appreciate - winter coming to an end! Our cove is opening up, and

the yard is reappearing too, though some stubborn mounds of snow are persisting.

Sometimes, surprisingly, meal leftovers can be the most tasty of all too!

Unbelievable

My goodness, just when I thought my earring was irretrievably lost, I saw it lying on top of leaves in my yard (note to self: another good reason not to blow leaves away too early in spring!). Can you spot it?

It was around the beginning of March that I first realized that one of my earrings was missing (the rest are packed and wrapped). I have no recollection of losing it, so there was no real clue as to where I should look beyond the previous day's clothing or bedsheets. I had just vacuumed and shaken out rugs that day, so didn't hold out much hope of finding it, despite going through a lot of dust and dirt in the vacuum canister. There were no diamonds to worry about losing though, but they were my good old everyday silver pair that should never fall off! They were the best, most comfortable pair.

I couldn't believe it when I encountered my missing earring on April 1st (had Dale played an elaborate joke on me?) as I walked around the yard. This is the benefit of looking closely at everything, I guess. I wasn't out looking for it, that's for sure, as I'd long accepted it was gone for good.

What an incredibly fortuitous find!

Enthralled

What a beautiful sight in my yard! I'm glad I stopped my yard clean up to bend down and take a closer look - what we're seeing is a dog lichen (grey and white structures) amongst mosses and grasses. The dog lichens have little rhizines (root-like veins) on their underside, that supposedly have a resemblance to dog's teeth.

Dog lichens are formed from the partnership between a fungus and cyanobacteria (or algae), and are able to harness gaseous nitrogen to help enrich soils.

The white curled up, toothy underside is what drew my eye to these beauties. How unusual!

This is Why

This is the reason why we don't chop and rake leaves yet

There is a young caterpillar inside the webby cocoon on the underside of this leaf that has yet to pupate - give it a chance to complete its cycle before you do yard chores. Be patient, and kind. There are many other creatures sharing this planet - it's not just us.

One month remains for us to enjoy this current paradise ... it's getting scary!

Hooligans-R-Us

We believe we have solved the glass shard mystery to our satisfaction ... what we have pieced together seems to make perfect sense.

The largest glass shard looked like this, which really got us thinking about the curved top and lip ...

and it helped us remember that Dale's kindness to red squirrels extends to him leaving water out for them on our deck during winter. He usually uses one of my small crucibles, that look like this.

We think we must have forgotten about the little ramekin, which got covered over with snow (probably when the big snowstorm dropped 2 feet on us in January while we were away). The snowblower would have encountered it, making short work of the little obstruction we weren't aware was there. It shattered and showered pieces all across the yard like a dirty bomb. So, it turns out we were the hooligans after all!

The Glass Shard Mystery

Ooh, how on earth did this happen? 

We found glass shards strewn all over our lawn as the snow melted - tiny segments that look as if they'd shattered or exploded apart. Here are some of our many pieces ...

As you can see, they look like beautiful faceted jewels, but in the lawn? How on earth did they get there? We're anal about not-littering or dropping unnatural things where they don't belong, plus glass is a major hazard to barefoot people (we know some!). We were perplexed and had no idea how they got there, but our enquiring minds kept playing with possible solutions. 

We  haven't had a wild drinking party where bottles were thrown off the deck (and anyway, how would they have shattered on the snow like this?) Had some hooligans been in our yard while we were away in the U.K. and broken bottles everywhere? We found them in a wide swathe, scattered far and wide so we concluded that it must have been a violent instance. We wondered whether we had left a bottle of liquid outside by mistake that may have frozen and shattered? Had there been a glass pane amongst all the wooden sheets we removed from the layout that had mistakenly been smashed? Surely, we'd have noticed at the time ...

 

We had so many questions and possible theories, but none seemed to fit as we traipsed up and down, picking up the shards, our hands freezing in the frigid late-March temps. It was a mystery that we couldn't let go, and we had better things to do than pick up pieces of glass from the lawn. 

We noticed that the glass was thick, and that some pieces were curved and rounded. Slowly, slowly a realization began to dawn ...  we think we worked out what did it ...  I'll leave you in suspense till tomorrow ... with our best answer

Moth Flowers

Last season's flowers can look so pretty - Dale thought the leftover flower petals looked like little moths

These hydrangeas are planted at our boat launch.

Rock Cracks

Rock cracks and mineral dissolution make interesting patterns - so much activity going on all the time that we don't see.

Changes

Our boat launch looks like this - a lot of ice, but the tipping point has been reached, and there's no going back now to full ice cover.

 The outflow from our lake looks like this just across the bridge

and the dam is spewing furiously (some flashboards are broken on the right hand side - again!)

Beautiful Mud

 I love seeing the icy patterns in the mud - fascinating