No Robins This Year

My birthday is often, in these latitudes, one of the first warm days of spring. I remember one sunny February 26th when I was working alone in the garden at Bacon's Castle, excavating a pit full of trash from the 1680s. There was a rustle of wings, and I looked up to find that the robins had returned. In the little dogwood trees around me were at least 50 robins, resting from their northward flight.

Not this year. This morning light snow is falling around my house, and as I stood on the train platform I was scoured by a bitter wind that turned the falling flakes into little icy missiles. My yard is still buried in snow from the Great Storm of 2010, and nothing is green but the rhododendrons and hollies, at least, the branches that weren't broken by the weight of the snow.

Ah, well, you can't be lucky every year.