Abloomin'!

Our long-awaited blooms have arrived!

The bay window in the dining room looks the way I'd dreamed it would when we bought the house: filled with plants and flowers.

All of the bulbs still in forcing vases (with only water to nourish them) are settling happily in their soil. There is a mystery unfolding in the low vase with the flower-whose-name-I-can-never-remember (it has a firm stalk and a big puffy purple ball on top): one bulb has sprouted; the other has not.


And there's also a tiny sprout of an unintentional and unidentified plant.

Our bird sightings are increasing: the recent snow (and, later, crusting of ice) have made our back porch more popular. We see a cardinal pair in the bushes next to the house, but rarely do they venture closer. We have a debate about whether we saw a house finch or a purple finch. David snapped a photo of the bird, but it's blurry and we can't see the breast, which would make the i.d. definitive. Thanks to Judith's confirmation, we can now identify the ubiquitous ground feeding birds as juncos, a common swallow that winters here.



Our little bluebird appeared briefly, but didn't feed. According to the Cornell Ornithology Lab, they like to eat fruit, not seeds, so I put some oranges (and bread crumbs) on the bir-goda (bird+pagoda), a piece of furniture David found on the side of the road last summer.