Meltdown time!

Remember the saying 'be careful what you wish for'? Well up here on this dirt road and the others in town we have been wishing for a thaw. For spring in some way to poke its head out and let us know it was coming. And this past weekend Mom Nature and her little group of hooligans have let us know that spring is coming.
It started simply enough with a rise in temperature. Good for sugaring, good to start the meltdown. That was Saturday, Sunday was another story. The temperature stayed up over night but the rain began. And by morning it was coming down pretty steadily. You could literally stand there and watch the snow banks melt. Then it rain harder. Bad for the sugaring and bad for the meltdown. There is still ice on the driveway with pools of water scattered about. The pathways from here to there look more like canals and I fear shortly I will see the mad red squirrel with friends out there in their little barges transporting seed from the birdfeeders the local squirrel seed storage facility.
On the good side I saw Cathartes aura or turkey buzzards on Saturday. I don't look for robins or even red winged black birds as much as I stare at the sky to see if that bird floating on thermals is a buzzard. At first they are a little hard to recognize. Now if you have ever seen one up close you realize these are an ugly bird. There is just no two ways about it. They have no feathers on their heads or necks which keeps them sort of free of germs and all the lovely things you can pick up when you dine on carrion. And they do have scrawny necks. But when they fly they become transformed. They will start the year out by coasting over the paved roads. That is where the thermals are, those warm air columns that rise up from the sun heated pavement.  Invisible columns of warm air that take an ugly bird and transform it into an amazing aerialist. Banking and turning, dark forms almost effortlessly floating in the blue sky. To me they represent spring.
One place I worked in Bellows Falls, VT had a back door that looked down to the Connecticut River and over to Fall Mountain in New Hampshire. Every year I would keep my eye to Fall Mountain because it is a lovely pile of rocks and Route 12 runs right by it. A great place for thermals to be created. Its is there that I first found my appreciation of turkey buzzards and their amazing abilities to soar. And since that time I have always thought of that bird as the true harbinger of spring.
So as I sit here tonight listening to the rain I think about those big, ugly birds floating about in the spring sky and I have hope the rain will stop and the sun will return and with it those columns of warm air and those loveliest of aerialist, the turkey buzzards.