73 / When The Cold Snap Bites
FFS!
Hi, welcome to For F*ture's Sake! A half-assed attempt to live sanely on planet earth.
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The fine weather persisted for so many days, it started to feel like the norm. But when the cold snap bit overnight, people woke in the morning and lamented the passing of an exception.
As I unfurled a roll of frost fleece over an array of grateful seedlings, a flight of swallows darted by overhead. “Hard to imagine,” I thought, “they might have recently shared a watering hole with lions.”
“Have we arrived too soon?” they must have wondered. “Could we have veered off course?”
Far below them, on spring soil, all manner of weasel-out-of-winter creatures have it so much easier.
The frog, secreted in mud at the bottom of a pond, can surface to a thaw only to find himself mistaken. No sweat! He simply retrieves his error and resumes his winter silence submerged.
A hedgehog, coming out for a sunbath but finding it chilly, can gladly curl up in her bed a while longer.
But a migrating swallow, staking thousands of miles of night and day sky for a chance of sunshine, has zero hope of an easy retreat.
And neither, as it happens, do I. Caught in a sudden hailstorm, I drop the daikon's duvet and dart inside.
The wind blusters and the frost fleece follows after, wrapping itself around the window as if to say, "please let me in."
I pour a coffee and wait it out.
These days, it seems, the weather has everyone — and everything — confused.
Until next week - S