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GroundhoggeryFebruary 02, 2009 Twenty-two degrees F when Trav and I left for our walk around 7 a.m.; 34 degrees when we got home a scant hour later. The field at Misty Meadows lived up to its name: a band of mistiness girdled it all the way around, a few feet above the yellow grass and scrub. Above that the sky was clear blue from one horizon to the other, and intook air brought the scent of earth with it. Haven't smelled much ground in all these frozen weeks. This was enough to make me believe in spring. As usual, it took me a few moments to remember that this crystal blue clarity meant that the groundhog would see his or her shadow, thus promising another six weeks of winter. Bah humbug. Who cares about the damn shadow? What I want to know is whether the groundhog can smell the waking earth. I can. Waking earth means spring is coming. This year we had a real "January thaw." Some years a warm spell in January has nothing to melt. People call it the January thaw anyway. This year's thaw had serious work to do, and when January gave way to February most of the ice was gone. Well done, thaw. Don't go too far away just yet. At the barn, a skim of ice lay on the outside water trough (an old bath tub, commonly seen in island pastures) because the heater wasn't plugged in. It broke up easily. The ground is still frozen pretty solid, but there's a thin layer of thawed grass on top. From the hoofprints and skid marks it was clear the girls had been cavorting. I fed and hayed, mucked out the two stalls and did a barrow's worth of picking -- during the cold-and-icy weeks manure froze almost as soon as it hit the ground, and the ground hasn't let go of it yet; you'd need a wedge and a splitting maul to get it loose. Such drastic measures aren't called for -- the flies are hibernating -- and time will do the job soon enough. It would have been a great day for riding, but I had another mission on the schedule: Trav, Uhura Mazda, and I were on the 10:45 a.m. boat out of Vineyard Haven, en route to an eye appointment in Sandwich. Of course I stopped at the Burger King on Route 28 for my second bacon double cheeseburger (hold the ketchup, add barbecue sauce) in a week. Living on Martha's Vineyard is a pretty good substitute for willpower: if there's no fast food on your side of the water, you can't eat it for lunch every day. A trip to Kappy's, the discount liquor store nearby, offered a revelation: I was looking for Skyy vodka and Kahlúa at considerably-cheaper-than-island prices, and not only were both on sale, Kahlúa now comes in hazelnut, French vanilla, and mocha as well as straight coffee. Indecision struck at once. (This is another reason I like living on Martha's Vineyard: having fewer options means wasting less time making up my mind. It's also my best reason for not having a TV.) I finally bought a 1.75 liter bottle of regular and a smaller one of mocha. The eye appointment was a follow-up on the cataract surgery I had last April: as routinely happens, the membrane surrounding my implanted lens was beginning to cloud over, and the solution is to punch holes in it with a laser. In preparation the ophthalmologist, Dr. Parekh, put dilation drops in my right eye, and after they'd done their work a technician put in a couple more kinds of drops. Then Dr. Parekh inserted a contact lens to keep my eyelashes out of the way, I rested my chin on a metal frame like the one in my optometrist's office, and the doc went zap zap zap zap zap with the laser beam. It sounded like an office stapler. After examining my eye, Dr. Parekh decided another round was in order: a bit of membrane hadn't let go yet. The second round was persuasive. I'm still having a hard time believing that I could drive myself to Sandwich, have my eye fixed, and drive back to Woods Hole immediately afterward. Trav didn't think anything of it. My Fellow Traveller lived up to his name once again: he had his lunch outside the Burger King, made friends on the ferry, and only got a little overenthusiastic when another dog appeared while he was tied outside Pie in the Sky, the deli/dessert shop in Woods Hole, while we waited for the 5 p.m. boat. The "wonderbar" I got (like a congo bar but heavier on the chocolate chips, and with raisins, coconut, and other stuff) was probably overindulgence, but boy did it taste good with dark roast Sumatran coffee. See above comments about living on Martha's Vineyard. I didn't get to Cynthia Riggs's annual Groundhog Day party till the tail end, but it was fun anyway.
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