Watch and see

I learned a new word yesterday:  phenology.  Thank you,  NPR.  I usually listen in the car on the way home from work.  Now that I am driving again, it*s just me, and I can choose the station!  It seems there are people who make their living paying attention to such things as the timing of spring, the budding and hatching of things, when the birds migrate, and any number of natural things, not just when the sun and moon rise and set.  Of course there are so many different kinds of natural things to pay attention to, and we really know so little, in the bigger scheme of things.  Still... it was stunning to me that there are scientific folk who pay attention to such things, and try to make a bigger picture.  Phenologists.  Here*s to them.

There are buds on the clematis.

I wonder how long it will take

To climb the porch pillar,

Bloom purple?

It is early for clematis.

The woolly bears were wrong

Last fall.

The weather line

To the groundhog

Got clogged,

His vision plugged

With those spring allergies

Early.

With all the predictors

Wrong,

We will have to watch and see:

Which birds return when;

Watch and see:

Whether there will be enough worms

For the robins;

Watch and see:

Whether the snowy owls

Now go home

To their tundra to the North;

Watch and see,

Test the earth,

Figure out anew

When to plant the tomatoes

This year.

Watch and see

Test the earth

Reconsider the cycles

Maybe even rewrite

The Farmers Almanac

For next year,

The year after,

And

The year after that.