Spring Storm Over Michigan's Thumb

The Thumb of Michigan got rains this week -- cold, spring rains. One of the storms that eventually brought moisture hung out over Saginaw Bay on Tuesday night and produced an evening display of lightning and thunder. Here is the leading edge of that storm, looking like it is on an adolescent high and headed for trouble.

The ground is still pretty cold. Some farm equipment is moving as farmers are eager to be planting. Gardeners are less enthusiastic yet since crawling and kneeling and tilling brings one much closer to the still very chilled soil.

As I write on May 2, on Friday, the ships that were anchored at the foot of Lake Huron have been passing by the lake house one by one. Today, as I drove north along M-25, I noticed a car pulled to the side of the road. The driver had stopped to take a cellphone photo of the snowbanks along the bluffs.

It is a cold spring in the Thumb.

Fifteen Ships

Ice coverage in the Upper Great Lakes has stalled shipping so that ships are anchored in the lower part of Lake Huron, just north of the Blue Water Bridges, while waiting for the weather to get warmer and the ice to clear. I counted fifteen ships anchored today.

The ships look like small vessels when you see them from the shoreline, but most of them are probably in the 500 to 700 foot range -- big ships. It is quite something when you think that in order to see this many ships, you would have to hang out at the Soo Locks during the shipping season for a few days.

An article in today's Port Huron Times Herald quoted one shipping official as saying that it could be at least another week before some of these vessels continue on their journeys. This shipping dilemma underscores the severity of the Winter of 2013-14, a winter to remember.

Boatnerd's AIS system reports these 16 ships at this location as of 8:50 pm EDT today. Most are at anchor, but at least two are underway tonight. It is interesting to click on the names of the ships as displayed on the Boatnerd site and read about where they are from, where they are going, how big each ship is, what cargos they carry, and so on.

Federal Miramichi
Orla
Drawsko
Olza
Prosna
Apollon
Diana
Federal EMS
CL Hanse Gate
BBC Xingang
Emilie
Federal Rhine
Bluebill
Algorail -- underway, bound for Goderich
Zealand Delilah -- underway, bound for Montreal
Wicko

Ode to the Daffodil

I know that poets like Wordsworth have framed words about the daffodil that are beyond any I can assemble, but I must try, too, to plumb the depths of what these piercing yellow blooms come to mean on a cold rainy day in Michigsn. 

They bow, yet are not obsequious. Their very form trumpets the time of growth yet speaks without fanfare and show. 

They pop up through sod, in ditch banks, in gardens. Tenacious, surprising, and expected, yes even longed for, the daffodil is the harbinger of warmth. 

On my kitchen windowsill on a wet day, they preach a silent sermon of life and light that emerges from the winter months and slowly turns my heart toward summer, again. 

Tiny Daff

A tiny daffodil, one of many that entered our household several years ago, found its way to the compost pile. It's barely as long as my middle finger but the yellow sunshine that it displays caught my eye when I strolled out to the compost pile last week.

I'm always in awe of the life force that is contained in bulb plants. For months these little buggers hide out in the frozen ground. No warmth. No light. No moisture. Then, come spring with a tad bit of warmth (think 35 degrees instead of 10 degrees) and the bulb starts growing. Absolutely, awesomely amazing. 

Dwindling

It is kind of a conundrum, this realization that dwindling snow piles are actually a sign of spring. South of Harbor Beach, there are bluffs that run along the shoreline. Not really like the swales (long sandy berm type geological features) that are found on the Saginaw Bay side of Huron County, these bluffs might have been the shoreline for the "old" Lake Huron, before the last glacial cycle.

Because the bluffs face east the snow gets morning sun, during the much colder part of a spring Great Lakes day. The ground temperatures stay cold and bluff snow melts very slowly, as you can see from this photo that shows green grass, blue skies, and one very large patch of snow, still dwindling.

Chollas in Bloom

The chollas are blooming. The plants are spiny, full of stems and prickers. They look like a shrub that forgot to grow leaves. But in the spring, their blossoms redeem them. These two images are probably staghorn cholla or pencil chollas. The blooms are red to orange to copper to burgundy in color.

The structure of the staghorn cholla, lots of stem and branches that emanate from a central trunk, appear to be a reddish brown color. Some sources label the stem color as purple. The copper blossoms accent the reddish branches, a delightful change up from all of the desert yellow and white flowers.

Tiny Kinglet

This tiny bird, a kinglet, showed up at the lake house today. I heard something "thunk" a window and figured that it might be a bird. The flies have been congregating on the east side of the house in the sun, and the birds love to pick at the flies and eat them.

Stunned and silent, but breathing and moving ever so slightly, the bird lay on the pavers for several minutes. It's beak was open, feet limp, eyelid partially visible. Within several minutes it righted itself and I was able to get some great photos of this tiny creature which I identified as a golden-crowned kinglet.

With its olive gray coloring and bright yellow and orange markings, this bird is a tiny marvel of color and nature.

How tiny? You can see the bird within the circle in this photo. It might have been 3-4 inches, a little bigger than an adult hummingbird.

Spring Whitetails

Driving across Atwater and then Bay City-Forestville Road today, I saw hundreds of whitetail deer. Snow is disappearing from the fields and the deer are scrounging for food among the cornstalks, wheat sprouts and sugar beet leftovers.

From a distance these animals appear to be in good shape after a very rough winter, but when I enlarged some of the photos, their ragged coats tell a story of how difficult the cold months must have been for some of them. Then, too, there are deer carcasses along almost every road in the Thumb. Now that the snowbanks are melting, those dead deer are appearing and will be a welcome food source for the returning turkey vultures and the ever present pairs of crows.

My guess is that I could have counted 300-400 deer in the herds that I saw today. There were scads of them in area near the intersection of Bad Axe Road and Atwater Road. I would pull to the shoulder, lower the driver side window, lift my camera and shoot. In that small amount of time, the deer come to attention and take off. Some stay to graze anyway, lifting their heads now and then, as if checking to see if the vehicle will be any threat to their supper plans.

Signs of Spring

The turkey vultures have returned. Today is the first day of spring and the vultures were riding the thermals along the bluff, out over Lake Huron. The day was quite windy. I first spotted crows riding the thermals, soaring and dipping as they flew south to north.

When I looked at the photos that I took up close, I realized that the soaring birds had been joined by a raft of turkey vultures. The birds would come from the south to the north and then disappear for ten or fifteen minutes. Then they would show up again. They probably flew inland over the fields, headed down the shoreline, and then caught a thermal up lake again.

The sunrise was very delicate looking, almost like a pastel composition. You can see the ice floes breaking up way out on the lake. That dark blue line on the horizon is open water.

By midday the winds pulled the ice elsewhere and open water advanced toward the shoreline. The blob in the right side of this photo is White Rock. The shoal is getting watery and slushy. Soon rivulets will form, like streams across the mushy ice. Spring is coming!

Secret Lupines

Growing lupines has been a challenge at the lake house gardens. At first the plants liked one bed near the shoreline. After a year or two, that fizzled. I moved them to a shadier spot and that worked, but only for a season or two. So I moved them to a woodland location and totally lost all of the plants.

Lupines can self seed and do so fairly aggressively. I thought I had scratched all of the baby plants from one bed last year. This year, a secret lupine made its way up through the chartreuse leaves of a burning bush. The bush must be acting like a mother plant, protecting the lupine, because this lupine is outdoing itself with majestic purple spikes that burst from the bush like teenagers ready to graduate.

The secret is out. The lupines are back.

Copyright 2012
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Justification

So what does my iris bed, newly worked this spring, have to do with the theological concept of justification? I hadn't thought about justification for a long time, but the iris bed dug that word right out of my brain.

Those of us who learned how to type on a typewriter (and do word processing in MS Word or other programs) know what it is to align the type on a piece of printed paper. We call it "justifying the margins" when we arrange the lines in a certain way, usually straight.

The iris bed had become unruly. The river stones were encroaching on the iris; the iris were moving into the stones. Ed hauled some field stone for me to place as a border. I got down on my knees and got to justifying the margins. That's what I did.

I thought about that old catechism word "justification" all the time that I worked in the stubborn weeds and cakey mud and iris rhizomes. The theologian's justification is probably a tad more complex than stones and mud. Nevertheless, it was good for me to think about cleaning up the margins in life by taking crooked stuff and making it straight.

Too deep? Probably.

Back to the garden. It's time to haul more stones.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

1950's Kids In The Tulips

I look at this photo from the early 1950's that my Dad took and I just am amazed. The little girls are my sister Carla and me. Carla would have been five or six, so I would be three or four.

We are standing in the orchard in front of the machine shed on my grandparents' farm in Wisconsin. The apple trees are in bloom and so are the tulips.

How my grandparents had the foresight to create such beauty on a Wisconsin dairy farm where they had 20 milk cows and farmed 57 acres I will never know. I look at that line of tulips and know that either Grandpa Bill or Grandma Rose had an eye for color and a green thumb.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

The Neighbor's Horses

There is a bench halfway up the lane that leads to the back fields and marsh at my Mom and Dad's farm in Wisconsin. I'm visiting my Dad this week, so I get to walk the lane every day.

Yesterday I took my lane walk late in the afternoon. A breeze whistled through the pine grove along the fence line. The two track lane is showing signs of drying after last month's snow and rain. The neighbor's horses were taking in the warm spring sunshine.

I showed the images that I took to Dad when we were having our cheese and crackers before supper.

"Your mom and I used to walk up the lane and take a cob of corn for the horses. They would sniff the cob and back away. Then, you'd break the cob, pull of a few kernels, and hold out your hand." Dad smiled, remembering Mom and how much she loved walking up the lane on the farm where she was born and raised.

He continued. "Then the horses would come back and eat from your hand." A pause, a smile. "You know what they would do? Paw the ground. They say thanks that way," he said, remembering a time when horses pulled plows and wagons and maybe even took you to town.

They ground might be dry enough to drive my Chevy Volt up the lane this week, just so he can see the land. The horses should be out. That would be good.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Gloom to Bloom

Wide bands of heavy rain swept across much of the Midwest this week, creating flooding on many rivers and making late April into a generally gloomy time. I slipped outside on Thursdayafternoon, thinking that I might do a bit of clean up in the perennial beds, but gave up when I looked at the dark clouds gathering in the western sky.

By 3 p.m. there were tornado watches out for most of southeastern Michigan. The clouds opened up, thunder was booming, lightning cracked, and rain was pouring down.

All of this April rain and flooding should lessen the dry conditions that have taken the levels of the Great Lakes to such lows. Here's hoping that the gloom soon lifts, the weather warms up, and the flowers begin to bloom.

We are all ready for some warmer weather. We are ready to go from gloom to bloom.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

The Great Quilt

Clouds, like a layer of quilt batting, spread across the western sky last night. Perhaps the Great One sat back from from her sewing machine, having finished another excellent quilt top, and pulled the batting out of the closet. She spread the batting out across the sky for the night, waiting for the cotton to settle in so that the top and bottom could be layered with the batting in between.

Then, on the morrow, she will stitch the layers together and will call it good. We will call it spring, spread across the continent like another marvelous quilt of many colors. The soil will warm. Plants will grow and flower. All from the Great Quilt of Warmth that is a new season of growth.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Singed Daffodils

Daffodils are finally coming up. Their tips are white and yellow, singed by frost and cold freezing weather. Daffs are hardy plants. The deer will not eat them, maybe due to an off taste. Daffodils spread quite aggressively. Several of the clumps that we take care of started out as five bulbs. This spring those clumps look like 15-20 plants are coming.

There's a cold rain over the Thumb this week. Fog covers the fields and shoreline in the morning. Most of the ice has melted on White Rock Shoal. I put one snow shovel into the basement but left a second one near the back door. Denver and the Dakotas are getting hit with a huge spring blizzard this week.

Great Britain has chalked up one of the coldest months of March on record. Their spring lambs are dying in droves, says London's Guardian newspaper which I read on Kindle several times a week.

Last year we had such an early spring. This year is the opposite. Anyway, welcome to the daffodils. We need 'ya!

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Straits Ice

Coming across the Big Mac Bridge yesterday, we realized that the Straits are still ice covered. Here's the approach on I-75, heading south toward the toll plaza on the St. Ignace side of the Straits. You can see some open water quite close to the north shore.

But from up on the bridge, in the middle of the Straits where the freighters go under the Big Mac, ice floes and huge chunks of ice had closed in any trails of open water that freighters might have opened.

We crossed on Monday, April 8. The Upper Peninsula still has lots of snow on the ground and it will take some warm weather and a striking sun to open up the channels on the northern Great Lakes. No doubt the Coast Guard icebreakers are very busy in the Upper Lakes this season.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Early Easter

March sunshine along Section Line Road, Huron County, Michigan

It feels like Easter is really early this year. And it is. Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, so it can fall any time from March 22 to April 25. Easter, on the liturgical calendar, is considered a moveable feast.

Here in Huron County, at 43.84 degrees north latitude, the sun's rays are finally warming the ground and melting the snow and ice. It will be a few days, maybe even a week, before the farmers pull their equipment on to the land and start spring work, though.

Yesterday, the Saturday before Easter, it was warm enough to do a little gardening. Ed and I cleaned out  clumps of hosta, iris, and daylilies. Ed hauled two garden carts full of shredded stems and leaves to the big compost pile. The daffodil clumps are emerging. Tulips are showing their curly leaves.

Even though the ground is cold and even though Easter is early, things are starting to grow.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

March Thaw

The cold March wind cuts through my winter jacket like a sharp knife. An evening walk turns into a bone chilling adventure, but the sight of water moving in a neighbor's corn field is encouraging.

In spite of the cold daytime temperatures, the snow pack is dwindling. Field tiles are opening. Water rushes across the fields and into the ditches, on its way to creeks and rivers, and, eventually, to Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron.

Even though late March days are cold, winter is facing defeat. When the field tiles run in Huron County, spring is coming.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Lonely Bench

It is the first week of spring and the Lake Huron shoreline is snow covered. A bench facing White Rock Shoal and the mighty lake is deserted, waiting for warmer weather and visitors to the lake shore.

Shipping begins this week with the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Welland Canal in Ontario. Ed and I haven't seen any freighters going past Cedar Bluff this week. Tonight, however, we did spot a Coast Guard ship, the buoy tender Hollyhock, stationed out of Port Huron, upbound around 7 p.m.

Readers of the blog know that I often use black and white photos. This one, while it appears to be black and white, is just what the camera recorded on a gray day in early spring in Michigan.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler