Snowdrop!

Yesterday I noticed the snowdrops are up, and so this morning I picked one. There is a very old dump in the woods behind Wit's End, where farmers have been throwing trash for generations, and we've got a nice collection of old glass bottles that turn up now and again as the ground freezes and thaws. Next, I went to visit a friend, to help him set up the first post for his new blog, Expect Eric, about Georgia O'Keeffe.

Eric is staying temporarily in a lovely house not far away from mine, with a broad vista of the dying landscape. Click on it for a full view, it is quite spectacular!

Along the way I passed scores of dead trees, big old ones,

medium sized ones,

and young trees as well.

Really the trees on exhibit here are quite representative of the condition of all of them.

Maples in particular seem to be turning black.

This huge one is next to the house where Eric is visiting. The bark is quite black, and shrinking away from the trunk.

Scattered around the lawn and at the base I found more snowdrops, and they are like miniatures. They should be about 4 or 5 inches high at least, but they are shorter than the brick. I found last year that individual leaves on trees were much smaller than normal, as were acorns and chestnuts. This year, for those plants and trees that emerge from dormancy, I expect even more shrinkage.

Most bizarre were swarms of bees - for the beginning of March, that seems aberrant, to say the least.

Here is an article in the Monthly Review, about the characteristics of capitalism that render it an unsustainable economic system. The analysis of climate change and resource depletion is guaranteed to scare the daylights out of you!