This one.... in The Book Book

April 2, 1985

Publication date April 2, 1985

Notes from the Cadillac Ranch

Two weeks into spring, let's take inventory. It must be time to put the ice scrapers away, to pair up the mittens and put them in a drawer. There can't be too much winter left.

Not when the robins and red-winged blackbirds are thick along the country roads. A solitary goose (it has a long neck, must have been a goose) flew south toward evening. There was a gap in its feathers on one wing. It must have had a rough winter.

But now the air is sharp the fragrance of freshly-hauled manure. New calves try out all systems, their mothers proud and anxious, as they establish a vital relationship for the summer.

The kids teed up all the sliced golf balls and fired them over the corn crib into the field. One spectacular shot curved left around the corn crib, then straightened out as the second stage fired and zoomed halfway to the creek.

Red points of tulips outline the freshly raked flower bed. (I raked a little so I could write about it.) Iris and day lily sprout yellow-green growth.

By the way, what are those very early, dark green, crinkley leaved weeds that are out in sheltered ares already? They look pretty shaped like house plants. In the summer they get tall and stringy. They aren't cockleburs, are they, Glenda?

Someone has been up on the roof. The TV antenna and the rotor control now agree that north is north after a winter of north being the last direction the wind blew the antenna.

As it warms up and the days get longer, it's good to be alive.