Signs of Spring

As I can’t ski, I’m walking these days.  If I get the operation on my shoulder, I think I might never downhill ski when I can walk.  I’ll follow my dad’s motto, “ Never stand when you can sit.  Never sit when you can lie.” Which reminds me of how the poor verb ‘to lie’ is being replaced by ‘to lay’.  People never lie down any more.  They ‘lay’ down even in the present and when they’re alone.  Enough.  I don’t want to start mourning the passage of ‘There are,’ which seems to have succumbed to ‘There’s’, whether what follows is singular or plural.

Today I walked rapidly up East Hill until I reached the fields beneath the hills that surround Vernon.  Then I ambled across the stubble and stopped at the end of the road.  Here I did stretches and rested.  I watched and heard a lot of birds.  Spring is in the air.  And on telephone poles, where two flickers entertained me for a while.  The pole was very old and mottled grey and they were well camouflaged against it.  One of them was passive and only moved when the other squawked and bobbed toward it.  I sat watching as they made about a dozen revolutions around the top of the pole.  Then the active one flew away revealing the buff colored patch at the base of it’s tail that I read when I got home is the sign of a flicker. I think I heard it later hammering on a tree.  In the last two weeks I’ve listened to quite a few woodpeckers drumming on any metal surface they can find.  It has made me laugh because it reminds me of the sight of Jim, naked and furious standing in the early morning light among the rocks of the Japanese garden in the front of our first house.  It had a tin roof and was the preferred spot for local woodpeckers to try to drum up a mate in the early spring.  Jim had had enough at around 5:30 one morning, so he bounded from bed, grabbed the slingshot and stormed out to the centre of all small stones, the Japanese garden.  From there he had a good shot at the sleep-wrecker.  Fortunately, fury is as blind as love and he missed the bird.  However when the stones started hitting the tin ever closer to its perch, the woodpecker bobbed off and left the morning silent and Jim alone among the stones with nothing but his slingshot, an image I enjoyed at the time and still do.  I also saw two hawks, a lone heron and a murder of crows on my walk today.

Since I had dinner and watched the Academy Awards with Mo and John last Sunday, I have seen two more of the winners.  Now I’ve seen five of the big ones.  This week, ‘The Artist’ and ‘The Iron Lady’ are in Vernon, so I will finally have seen most of the winners, ‘The Help’, ‘Hugo’, ‘Beginners’, ‘My Week with Marilyn’, ‘The Descendants’.  They’re not a bad group of movies.

On Saturday, I went back to Silver Star to help with the Fox Fun Day.  I had a good time back with the SSASS gang, even if all I could do was flip burgers.

Mo and me, wearing a Hawaiian apron to flip burgers at Fox Fun day

Lynne and me, still in the Hawaiian apron Caroline made me.  The man in black behind me is Richard,the evil colleague who ran over the backs of my skis and caused my fall.

Some of the SSASS gang

One of the houses I saw on my walk around Silver Star, before I started flipping burgers.  The snow is thick on the mountain, but there is no snow in Vernon.

Some of the runs at Silver Star

Ranching and silver mining are part of the history of the Vernon area, so the theme of Silver Star is nineteenth century mining.  Many of the houses are this style.  Each is painted in about five different colours, mostly brighter than this one.