Spring Chickens

Progress on the painting of Elizabeth's sculpture. It's going slowly, unlike the woods woman. I'm confident that it will eventually be okay, but it isn't as much fun as the first one was. I don't know why, and my only guess is that I don't like the color as well. Or maybe the size isn't as inspiring.....too small. Or maybe neither of these. Oh, well.

The last few days have really seemed like spring. In fact Lisa and I went outside to paint on Wednesday. We did get too cold after a few hours since we chose to stand on the breakwater, the coldest, windiest spot in town. Nevertheless, it was fun to give it a try and we brought our paintings inside to continue working.

Today, driving back from Harrington, I saw the evidence everywhere that people had decided to leave winter behind. Even though the temperature couldn't have been more than the low sixties, people were out in T-shirts and sandals. In Machias there were couples sitting in chairs on the porches attached to their homes in the mobile home park that faces Route 1. All along Rte. 190 women from the reservation pushed strollers, wearing tight jeans and those shirts so popular now that leave the midrift bare. Boys zoomed by on motorcycles. In Eastport high school students strolled along the streets with sweatshirts tied around their waists, in some cases in clouds of dust from the public works department trucks busy sweeping up the winter accumulation of sand and dirt. I watched it all over the steering wheel of my car, which I held with age-freckled hands and silver-ringed fingers. At some point I changed from the observed to the observer, smiling in the distance with a kind of pleasure I never felt when I was the one who took out my summer wardrobe in March. It's a quiet smile that goes well with my purple-lined all-weather coat, which is just perfect for today's temperature.

The season did not go uncelebrated by me, however. I stopped at Elmer's Discount and bought fifty feet of chicken wire and some posts to make a bigger pen for the chickens. I want them to have a good summer, with lots of room. I got taller wire and posts, since Demeter flew over the shorter fence yesterday. I knew she would, eventually, since she did it last year, but I hoped it would take her longer to remember how to do it. No such luck. The dogs told me all about it yesterday. I heard them barking in an unusually excited way, and when I looked out, Demeter was happily (if stupidly) pecking away not eighteen inches from the dogs' noses on the other side of their gate. That ended her outdoor adventures until I can build her a higher pen.