By Wowser! Paddocks, hillside, laneway, front yard … everywhere froze into solid ice last night. As the temperatures dropped all day it just got harder. Impressive! The squirrels and the small birds love it. The turkeys … and the four legged critters … not so much.
And this two legged creature … I’m in my sixties now. That is young compared to my wife and many of my friends. But I do notice that I’m wearing out body parts … little by little. I also note that when I’m moving around on this kind of ice … I really AM following Ede’s family motto – ‘Don’t fall down!’ Or at least – TRY REALLY REALLY HARD TO NOT FALL DOWN. 😉
I have learned the hard way that injuries I might pick up now … take a LONG time to heal … and some of them just don’t ever get there. PLUS … there are two donkeys, two goats, eight ducks and twenty-one chickens counting on me to show up with food and water. This is definitely not the time of year to have to hobble around. So … arms out – feet shuffling along the ice – head up.
It has been a few years since we’ve had this kind of melt. Snow to water to ice. One year we had our cars parked back here. Overnight their tires froze into the ice. We had to have a tow truck come to pop us out. In the process one of the cars ended up with busted tie rod ends. Oooops! Another year the paddock was so full of water it was like a swimming pool. We waded around almost to the tops of our boots. It looks like we’ll have a stretch of cold weather for another week … at least. But THEN it is March. There is ALWAYS a melt in March.
Well … except for that year that we could only be out twenty minutes at a time because the windchill would freeze your face. But that has only been ONCE … Am I remembering the 1960’s and 1970’s properly …? It seems to me that March – and St. Patrick’s Day – were celebrated in spring. Grass spring – sunshine spring – even one run to the ice cream store in Tamworth kind of spring.
The back paddock was looking just like the laneway. So I dragged out the winter bedding from the wind shelter and spread the lovely mess of it to give the jennies and the goats some surer footing. It looks AWFUL and will smell awful if we get a quick melt. It works though.
Rosie would tell you it is more important that it gives the shelter over to some tasty fresh straw topped with green good smelling hay.
Over and out from the ice age!
The Meadow View 