Spring is Springing

We’re now one week into Lent.  Admittedly, I did take a day off yesterday to eat a slice of cake and a few Nachos, as it was a friend’s birthday – but then, as I see it, the point of Lent being forty days of self-restraint over a forty-six day period is that it allows for the occasional day off. 

I used to think that Lent was called that because, before globalisation and frozen or tinned foods, it was a lean time.  It was the end of winter, most of the supplies stored in autumn were used up, and there weren’t many fresh vegetables growing, cows giving milk, or hens laying.  Making it an official fast in remembrance of Jesus’s ordeal in the wilderness was both a way of deterring people from eating up the last of the remaining supplies too quickly (or the wealthy and greedy gorging themselves on supplies that everyone else needed), and a reminder that God knows how it feels to experience hunger and hardship.

More recently, though, I learned that the word ‘Lent’ actually comes from the fact that it is in spring, when the days lengthen.  When I walk home from work, instead of needing to switch on the torch on my phone as soon as I set off, I walk in a rosy glow of sunset and often don’t the torch until an hour later, by which time I’m not far from home anyway.

A few weeks ago, I may have expressed scepticism about how uncannily early all the flowers are coming in this year.  Lately, apart from the three-cornered leeks,

I have seen creeping comfrey,

forsythia,

heather,

clematis and even roses, and the first buds of ivy-leafed toadflax.  However, I am not going to complain, since last week I also saw my first butterfly

and first bumblebee

of the year, and I’m just relieved that they have something to eat. 

According to Tove Jansson in Finn Family Moomintroll, the first butterfly of spring is an omen of things to come:

 

‘As everyone knows, if the first butterfly you see is yellow, the summer will be a happy one.  If it is white then you will just have a quiet summer.  Black and brown butterflies should never be talked of – they are much too sad.’

 

However, as Icy Sedgwick warns, there are other superstitions that yellow butterflies (and the brimstone butterfly I saw was basically yellow, even if it looks greenish in the photograph) predict death or sickness.  So I hope the year brings nothing worse than the coughs and colds I’ve had so far.  I’m very relieved that PDB11 has managed not to catch those off me, considering that I’ve had a bad enough cold to be off work for two weeks, and that he generally catches illnesses more severely than I do.

If we have a day fairly soon where I have some free time and it isn’t raining, I ought to plant some more flower seeds in the tubs in our yard (you can’t really call it a garden). After all, we have two colonies of bees living in our roof, and plenty of butterfly visitors. 

First of all, though, I need to decide what to do with the cluster of ash seedlings in one of the tubs.  I suggest that if I dump them out in the triangle of land between our house, the main road and the little side-lane, some of them might stand a chance.  I know this sounds insufficiently appreciative of trees, but honestly, I live on the edge of a wood, and there are trees in the few bits of open earth we have in our garden, including an ash which drops its seeds everywhere.  I suspect that if humans became extinct, sycamore maples and ash would become the new dominant species, considering how widely they spread their seeds.

I’m trying to do my best for wildlife.  The pond I dug in the autumn hasn’t attracted any frogs so far, but, as my friend Doom Metal Singer, with years of experience of nurturing frogs and even newts in the pond behind her caravan, told me, it has to develop gradually.  First you get insect larvae breeding in the pond, and when the frogs know there are plenty of larvae to eat, they turn up, and then they spawn.

In the meantime, though, the main wildlife we seem to attract is mice in the kitchen.  They have now learned how to climb to even the top shelf in the larder, as I discovered on Sunday when I found droppings on all three shelves, only a week after evicting the last mouse that was making a nuisance of itself.  I managed to trap this one by Sunday evening, and released it in a nearby field.  I chose a different location from last time, just in case it was the same mouse returned, as I didn’t want to make it too easy for the mouse to find its way home.

For now, I hope that if we get into a habit of keeping any gnawable food (such as loaves of bread, bags of muesli, or seeds and suet-cake for the bird-feeders) only in inaccessible top cupboards, and only tins in the larder, the mice will learn that it isn’t really worth coming here.

I realise that I’m making this a lean time for mice.  But I hope that, as spring comes on, they can find enough food in somewhere that isn’t my kitchen.