A Cold April

April 22, 2025

I was only going to feed the birds until the end of March, until there was enough new food from the surrounding landscape, but the month of March was so cold, and the first half of April as well, that, a few days off Easter, I was still going out every morning with a bowl of sunflower seeds –and a wooly hat on my head—to leave piles of black shells under the suet blocks and on the flat surfaces of the stonewall. Easter has now passed (with its freak pulse of hot weather), and I’ve set the wooly hat aside, but I’m still out there with my bowl of seeds every morning. How can I disappoint the birds, or the cat who watches them from her perch inside our utility room? They are there each new day, waiting for me in the wisteria arbor, in the holly bush, and on the branches of the maples at the edge of the woods. Many don’t wait for me to go inside before they swoop in to enjoy their breakfast. They whoosh past me, confident I won’t harm them.

I’m certainly trying not to. Nor do I shoo away the squirrels, chipmunks, and voles who also come to feed. Toward the end of my father’s life, he was locked in mortal combat with the squirrels in his back yard, trying to keep them off his feeders, but the way things are going, I’m happy to see whatever species shows up out there alive and kicking.

The woods remain brown, though a slight fuzz of green has finally begun to creep over the land. The skunk cabbage has unfurled and no longer looks, in its tight purple cone, like some tasty vegetable you might buy in a Venetian market, but the oaks and maples of our woods are still mostly skeletal, standing vigil over the rotting tangles of their brothers and sisters blown down in the violent storms of the past years, and the footbridge on my neighbor’s property still lies askew where the August floods ripped it from its moorings and threw it onto the bank of the stream. It will not be repaired. Too costly, too many other pressing expenditures. It will become a local ruin, yet another marker –man-made or natural– of the extreme weather increasingly visited upon us, changing the contours of our landscape, blocking, or rerouting its watercourses, reminding us that our environment is at the mercy of the ever more unpredictable weather, weather made more unpredictable by the poor choices of humankind, our choices and those of successive governments.

Yes, a cold April. Today, on Easter Monday, the warm pulse of the weekend is gone, and the chilly winds are blowing again through the still denuded trees. It’s hard not to feel as if nature is holding herself back from us, waiting to see what’s going to happen.

What is going to happen?

You wonder what’s in people’s minds. I mean, the climate-change deniers. They live here, too, don’t they? They look out their windows just like I do. They watch the news and see the images of the floods and the violent storms lashing cities and towns they’ve lived in or traveled to, or don’t need to watch the news because the waters are rising around their own homes, the winds ripping the roofs off their barns and garages and toppling trees across roads and powerlines.

Does the present administration really think the actions of humans have had nothing to do with this? Does it really believe the planet isn’t changing? Does it believe the scientific community is going to come up with some clever trick at the last minute to stave off disaster?

Even if the administration doesn’t believe in climate change, global warming, or the cataclysmic events they can see right in front of their eyes, why cancel the clean energy contracts which are employing people? Why roll back air and water quality regulations? Are they nostalgic for the smog of the 1970’s or the summer of 1969 when Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River was so choked with pollution it caught fire?

It’s as if they want to see how dirty they can make the country, how filthy and degraded.

Just to annoy the libs?

And then what?

When people started warning about climate change decades ago, the warnings always ended with the cliche that we needed to save the planet for future generations. We still say this because even though the phrase is tired and over-used, in every cliché there is truth. Because so little has been done, however, we are now faced with the fact that, though future generations are certainly in peril, those of us alive today have just as much to fear.

Because it is springtime, the time of new life, I am perhaps more consumed by my desire to help the plants, animals, and insects around me, while I still can, while they’re still here, and while the cycles of their lives are still recognizable to me.

I feed them: the birds, the squirrels, the chipmunks, and the voles. I plant flowers that the bees and the butterflies can feed from. I press my husband to delay his spring cleanup, to not disturb the piles of leaves along the edges of the lawn until the night temperatures are high enough so the bees and insects sheltering under last fall’s leaf cover won’t perish. Small acts that might make me feel a little better, but which will not save the planet or change the course of an administration bent on environmental destruction.

Will a placard do that? Will a crowd of placards with like-minded folks standing beside me? I don’t know, but I need to do something for the birds who wait for me each morning, I need to do something that honors their confidence.