Our Mixed Up Spring Weather | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Kathy Manos Penn is a native of the “Big Apple,” who settled in the “Peach City” – Atlanta. A former English teacher now happily retired from a corporate career in communications, she writes a weekly column for the Dunwoody Crier. Read her blogs and purchase her book, “The Ink Penn: Celebrating the Magic in the Everyday” on her website theinkpenn.com.

    I got a kick out of Charles Seabrook's late March "Atlanta Journal-Consitution" column where he described the first day of spring as New Year's Day for "wild creatures." He imagined that the Carolina Wren singing outside his window March 20 was singing Happy New Year as it and other songbirds prepared for nesting season. Our family of Wrens started refurbishing last year's nest just outside our screened porch in early March, perhaps because of the warmer temps. When the door to the porch is open, the cat is on the prowl and focused on their activity. It's interesting to hear the different language the Wrens speak depending upon where Puddin' is. When she's on the porch watching them, they hiss. If not, they chirp.

    I don't always get to see some of the small birds that pass through, but this year I spied a pair of dark-eyed juncos with their distinctive gray cap and face and white lower breast. Another day, we looked out the kitchen window to see a red-shouldered hawk sitting on a big tree branch about six feet from the bluebird house, where a pair of bluebirds had settled in late February. He stayed there at least 20 minutes. Then later that day, there arose such a clatter; no, it wasn't Santa and his reindeer. It was a huge flock of birds all milling around the treetops and squawking. We supposed the hawk was in the neighborhood again, and the flock was sounding the alarm.

    You may have read that Georgia's blueberry crop was damaged irreparably by the 20-degree temps we had the week of March 13th, and we didn't escape unscathed here in Metro Atlanta. Our azaleas had started to bloom, and their tender buds were wilted by the frost as were the green shoots on our butterfly bush. The shrubs we planted all down the driveway last year have a brown cap of leaves now. Thankfully, our gardener tells me they will come back, and she'll eventually trim off the unsightly dead leaves.

    Another sign of our early spring was Banjo balking at going out for his walks. As he says, "This heat is too much for a little boy in a fuzzy suit." He took to sleeping in our guest bathroom by mid-March, a sure sign he feels the heat.

    On top of that, our boy is allergic to inhalants-translation, everything we humans are allergic to. He doesn't seem to have sinus problems like we have; instead, he has skin problems. If we catch it in time, megadoses of prednisone will prevent him from breaking out in hot spots and then having to be shaved. Fingers crossed we manage to stay on top of them. I'd been missing our compounding pharmacy, but miss it even more as I'm running out of the chewy dog treats they compounded for me from prednisone. Now, I'm back to trying to camouflage the pills to get the boy to eat them. We used peanut butter until we found out he's allergic to that too!

    And finally, there's the screened porch. Though we haven't yet done a major clean up, we've dusted it off several times so we can relax out there. One March Sunday, it was warm enough to eat dinner on the porch, and then the temps dropped to the 20s the next week. As you well know, we dust it off, and within hours, it's covered in pollen once again. Wouldn't it be nice if the pollen ended earlier this year too? Regardless, it's safe to say spring has sprung.