Cold snap.
Today was one of those early April days when it's colder than seems likely: cars iced, precipitation freezing in and out of view, drops hissing the windows when they hit. Exactly the kind of day (and night) to hole up and work.
My one trick, again.
It's true: at this time of year, I get what might be called inordinately focused on flowers. The trees are going now, one kind at a time: the maples, the tulip magnolias, the redbuds, the willows, the dogwoods, the beeches. On the other side of the world, willows I love have long had their leaves; in mere weeks, the wisteria will perfume the streets across from the grocery; chestnut candles will bloom out pink and white all over town.
In the waning hours of the weekend, the smell of baking fills my apartment. Once the dishes were all done earlier, it seemed ill-advised not to use the kitchen for something useful. And so I am stocking up for the week: the espresso pot cleaned and readied for the morning, the cafe au lait bowl perched at the ready, the banana bread rising in the oven. This week, I tell myself, will be the week I not only stay on the task but know what the task is.
Turning, curling.
Today, the wind: nothing like the storm we had in September, but hard enough to make umbrellas hurt and to leave us all misted at midday. A commission came in for a piece of writing I'm excited to do--which doesn't mean I won't put off doing it as long as possible, I'm sure, not least because a late-May trip will probably put the finishing touches on what I'll be working through. An unlooked-for correspondence kept up and got more interesting. Meeting one person in the coffeeshop became meeting a group of people at every turn. By the end of the day, though the temperature had plummeted, nothing else had. And tomorrow, projects will be afoot anew.
Hunting and seeking.
Because the temperature was so good by late afternoon, I decided to venture down to the prairie for a look around and some reading outside. In the environmental center's garden is a tiny fishpond with accompanying Adirondack chairs that seemed like a good perch for working through some more Thomas Hardy--until the first frog turned up, over on the opposite edge of the pond from where I was sitting. I had only my macro lens, but I did my best slow-motion creeping and got as close as I could to the pond's edge. I disturbed them every time, though, alas. It didn't take long for me to give up on reading altogether and just to take a seat on the stones that edge the pond--just to sit, just to see what would happen next. A tadpole adolescent shot to the surface. Another one followed. A few minutes later, the frog you see here--who swam off a split second after I took this picture--came to the surface and hung there, his nose and eyes out of the water, his body perpendicular to its surface. He hung there for a time too brief for me to turn the camera back on and catch him; seeing me, he slipped backwards into the water but then darted in my direction--a mistake he realized he'd made just as soon as he got ready to surface again and found my inexplicable dark bulk even closer and huger than before he'd submerged.
Though I could spot other frogs with their eyes and noses above water at the pond's edges--one smartly hid himself in bright green algae so that his eyes were mere bumps in its surface--I did not see that darting frog again before rain started to fall.