Holy Week and A Mighty Wind!

Hi, everyone!

Holy Week starts with Palm Sunday and goes through Easter.  Grandma brought me palms from church to mark the start of the week.  Then, on Tuesday, we took another walk around the yard, looking for signs of renewing life.  There were daffodil shoots poking through the snow.   The chewed-off crocus were doing their best to bloom.  The snowdrops were blooming in the snow.  Some creature had dug a great big burrow in the window box!  I wonder if it’s a ground hog?

On Wednesday, Grandma took me to see the Easter display of flowers at Lamberton Conservatory in Highland Park.  I remember going there with James and Thomas one year!  There were baby quail near the admission desk that weren’t even two weeks old!  The daffodils and the porch display were just as pretty as I remembered them from being there before.

While I was looking at the turtles gathered under the heat lamp, a duck flew into the little pond and started to nip at their shells!  Later I saw a sign that said that the duck was found as an orphan duckling and has become very spoiled!

Lots of the plant displays at Lamberton Conservatory remind me of places Grandma and Grandpa have taken me!  The tulips remind me of Keukenhof Gardens in the Netherlands.  The bromeliads are just like the ones in Plantation Gardens on Kauai.  The white strelitzia looks like ones I saw at Kula Gardens, on Maui.  I saw shell ginger every time we walked to the beach at Poipu Kai.  There were pitcher plants at the insect-eating plant museum we visited in California.  In Hakone, Japan, wild blue hydrangea line the tracks of the little mountain railroad.  There was a Buddha’s hand growing on the wall in the Palazzo Borromeo gardens on Isola Bella in Lake Maggiore, Italy.  It’s nice to be able to see so many of my plant friends close to home!

I made sure to visit my other plant friends in Lamberton Conservatory.  I really like the color of the coral hibiscus and I said hello to my favorite croton plant.  There’s a new bench made out of twisted branches and my cactus friends have a new cattle skull to decorate their desert.  I said hello to my animal friends, too!  Chuck Norris, the turtle in time-out, has two new buddies living with him.  The button quail were chirping hello!

Since it was Holy Week, it seemed especially appropriate to see bunny ears cactus and Easter lilies!

After we visited the Conservatory, Grandma and I took a walk around the rest of Highland Park to see what new life we could find.  The helleborus in the Poets Garden had been smushed flat by the snow, but they were starting to bloom, anyway.  The winter aconites and snowdrops were blooming where the snow had melted.  Grandma and I checked out our favorite ground hog burrow, but the ground hogs weren’t out.  I did say hello to my favorite amur cherry tree before we left!

By Good Friday, the snow had melted enough that Grandma and Grandpa and I could spend the night at the bay.  Whatever had been eating the euonymus branches was still at it!  Something got through the deer fence and ate almost every flower bud off the rhododendron!  We can’t figure out what kind of animal could have done that!  The water level in the bay is high for this time of year, but not as high as last year.  I hope the water stays low enough that I can kayak with Grandma this summer and get powerboat rides with Grandpa!  It was cold and soggy at the bay, so Grandma and I started a new jigsaw puzzle!

When we got back to Fairport on Saturday, Grandma and I took another walk around the yard looking for new life.  The big pile of plowed up snow is getting much smaller.  Now that the snow in the back yard has melted, the azaleas are back to their usual shape.  On the south side of the house, there are more crocus in bloom.

We shared Easter dinner with Joe-san and Nancy-san and Tilly and Moose-san.  I helped Grandma make a sour cream peach pie to take!  Tilly and Moose-san showed me their Easter decorations, then they helped me cut the pie for dessert after dinner.  Everything was yummy!

After Easter we had a couple of warmer days.  Grandpa said it was time to take down the snow gauge.  Then Grandpa said I could help him replace the grease in the head of Grandma’s KitchenAid mixer.  I had to be very careful not to touch the old, dark, sludgy grease when Grandpa scraped it out.  Then Grandpa filled the space with clean, white grease.  I helped reassemble the mixer head.  Grandma said she’ll have to make something nice with the mixer to celebrate having new lubrication!

Yesterday we had a big windstorm that lasted all day!  Just about lunch time, I heard a big thump!  When Grandma looked, a big branch of the crab apple tree in the front yard was hanging on the corner of the dining room roof!  Grandpa had to cut some of the branches off before he could move his car out of the way.  When he cut through the biggest branch to get it off the roof, it sagged onto the driveway and stayed stuck!  When Grandpa finally got it cut through, part of it landed on his ladder and broke the ladder!  We were lucky that the only damage was the ladder and a bent gutter section.  Grandma and I helped cut up the big branches and stack them out of the way!  The big wind was caused by a cold front moving through, and it started snowing while we were working!  Can you see the snow flakes on my mane?

This morning there was snow on the deck again!  I think Grandpa took down the snow gauge too soon!   I’ll have to keep looking for spring for a while longer!

Love,

Lion-san