Tuesday

7 February 2017

— Snowing like a banshee out there!

Good Morning All,

As kids we sometimes said someone was laughing like a banshee. I had no clue what a banshee was, but back then I had no need to look it up since a banshee was like whoever it was laughing like that.

So,  just now, sixty odd years later, I looked it up. Wikipedia says:  “From Irish mythology, a woman of the fairy mound, a female spirit who heralds the death of a family member, usually by shrieking or keening.”

That definition stands to reason, given the Irish neighborhood in which I grew up, given the rich Irish culture seeping into me, unbeknownst to my lucky self. (And given, not least, the deep and abiding sense of Irish morbidity!)

Anyway, it is not actually snowing like a banshee here at the moment, no winds moaning and wailing in the eaves. Rather, a gentle snow fall slanting in on an easterly breeze across my two large south-facing picture windows. The flakes finding shelter in under the gutters are mostly dime-sized, but there is an occasional and nearly weightless quarter floating down among them. I have been leaning back in my desk chair for a good twenty minutes, not attending to my morning Day Book regimen, but being entirely mesmerized by the falling snow, the first proper snow of the year, what the poet and short story writer Conrad Aiken refers to as “silent snow, secret snow.”

Well, not entirely sitting. Because of the two inches of snow cover, my fine feathered friends are here in abundance. As such, I did get off my backside long enough to go out and put double rations of black sunflower seeds into my two hanging feeders and the large octagonal-roofed feeder the former owner secured to a back fence post. Under these, I spread the mix of wild-fowl seed for the larger birds, and from the branches of the apple tree hung a few more golf-ball sized mixtures of seed-and-fat wrapped in green plastic nets. 

As if that were not enough to prove me to be one of those environment liberals encouraging sloth and welfare cheats among the local bird population, I put a cupful of already shelled sunflower seeds into the standing birch feeder on my patio. I have let it be known to the pushy sparrows and blue tits that those seeds are primarily for the goldfinches since those little darlings seem unable to shell the big seeds by themselves.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. The inimitable Jennifer, as you have read, asks whether the astronauts didn’t land on 20 July 1969. The answer is, yeah, Armstrong and one of those two other stiffs did. But that was just practice. The real landing was the Apollo 14 crew on my birthday in 1971, thank you very much. I mean you must have seen the multi-colored banner attached just under the fake-flapping flag: Hi, Bheka! Many Happy Returns on Your Day!